TO REVOLUTIONISE electronics, researchers may have to keep their faces
straight—the faces of their semiconductors, that is. Rough spots on
surfaces of semiconductors topple spinning electrons, says a team of physicists,
so avoiding them could be key to developing “spintronics,” which uses electrons
all spinning in the same direction.
Conventional electronics simply exploits electrons’ charge, but a flow of
electrons spinning in the same direction also carries a “spin current”. This
gives circuit designers another property to play with, and researchers hope to
use spin currents to create everything from optical sensors to “qubits”, the
ephemeral bits of information…
