Applied Physics and Materials Science

Spintronics

Spintronics is the use of a fundamental property of particles known as spin for information processing. In many ways, spintronics is analogous to electronics, which instead uses the electrical charge on an electron. Carrying information in both the charge and spin of an electron potentially offers devices with a greater diversity of functionality. Spintronic devices promise to solve major problems in today's electronic computers, in that the computers use massive amounts of electricity and generate heat that requires expending even more energy for cooling. By contrast, spintronic devices generate little heat and use relatively minuscule amounts of electricity. Spintronic computers would require no energy to maintain data in memory.