Spintronics

Spintronics ( from the words and spin electronics), sometimes also called spin electronics or Fluxtronik, is a new area of ​​research in nanoelectronics, which is part of the basic research to a few special cases. Spintronics is based on the magnetic moment of the electron to display and processing and not only on its electrical charge as the conventional semiconductor electronics.

Under the older term magnetoelectronics is essentially also the use of the electron spin understood information processing. However, in contrast, spintronics is among others in the more general term include the realization that you can manipulate spins not only with magnetic fields, but also eg with electric fields.

Basics

Spintronics based on the possibility of the so-called spin injection in semiconductor materials, but also organic or metallic materials, and the spin injection can be carried out, for example, into the semiconductor from the metal. With the spin injection spin-polarized current can be generated in the said materials. These ways with the magnitude and direction of the spin expectation further degrees of freedom that can be used to provide additional properties for the information display.

Applications

An application of spintronics have hard drives with " spin valve" thin-film read heads that use the GMR or TMR effect. The giant magnetoresistance GMR makes it possible to detect very small magnetic domains and thus significantly increase the capacity of hard disks. For the discovery of the GMR effect Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics.