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The Birth of Spinplasmonics
Roland Piquepaille writes "You might have heard of spintronics, a technology that uses the magnetic quantum properties of the spin of electrons, or plasmonics, another one which 'involves the transfer of light electromagnetic energy into a tiny volume, thus creating intense electric fields.' Now, researchers at the University of Alberta (U of A) have merged these two nascent research fields to create a new nanotechnology field called spinplasmonics. According to the researchers, this new technology, which was already used to control the quantum state of an electron's spin to switch a beam of terahertz light, could one day be the basis for 'computers with extraordinary capacities.'"
'computers with extraordinary capacities'
It'll run Vista.
given lots of spin!
Computers today already have extraordinary capacities, at least compared to those of twenty years ago, which already had extraordinary capacities compared to those of forty years ago, and so on back to the first computer.
Let's have some numbers here, please. How much is that in Volkswagens or Libraries of Congress?
This press release has a few misleading pieces that should be corrected for the public record:
"The spintronics field is barely a dozen years-old...The field of plasmonics, which is even younger than spintronics..."
This is patently untrue. Work on plasmon and surface plasmon physics has been going on for more than 50 years. It is certainly true that the name 'Plasmonics' is rather recent, and fabrication capabilities have advanced dramatically to better exploit these effects, but the field of study is fairly well established.
"One of the main challenges for plasmonics researchers is finding a way to propagate light over a long distance through solid materials."
Spintronics will not mitigate this problem. There are many plasmonic structures which have relatively long propagation lengths, but when one confines the field to lateral dimensions less than 1/100th of the wavelength, the propagation length is going to be very short, regardless of the electron spin.