Major Breakthrough In Spintronics Research

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Spintronics is the field of research into developing devices that rely on electron spin rather than electron charge to carry information. A major advance has been made by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where they have for the first time generated, modulated, and electrically detected a pure spin current in silicon. Progress in this field is expected to lead to devices which provide higher performance with lower power consumption and heat dissipation. Basic research efforts at NRL and elsewhere have shown that spin angular momentum, another fundamental property of the electron, can be used to store and process information in metal and semiconductor based devices. The article abstract is available from Applied Physics Letters."

Comments

I don't get it

[Quadraginta]

Now, the press release says the exciting thing about "spintronics" (ugh) is that " it frees one from the constraints of capacitive time constants and resistive voltage drops and heat buildup which accompany charge motion."

Well, fair enough; I can readily imagine that if you could get information to flow through a magical material without having to actually make electrons move, that would be great. No more of that pesky knocking into the lattice that they do which converts their motion into heat.

But...um...how exactly do you get a spin current without the electrons actually moving? I mean, given that the spins in question are nailed to the electron? Seems tricky. Like driving down the highway without having your car move...

Furthermore, if we read further down the abstract, we find this:

"NRL scientists first inject a spin polarized electrical current. . . .which generates a pure spin current flowing in the opposite direction. . ."

Sounds to me like the existence of their spin current depends on the existence of an old-fashioned charge current. So how's this help? How is this a "key enabling advance" (as the press release calls it), still less a "major breakthrough" as the /. article excitedly and credulously calls it?

Re:I don't get it

[Tim C]

"spintronics" (ugh)

Obviously the reasoning there is "electronics = electron + ics, therefore spintronics = spin + tronics". Which of course means that it really ought to be simply "spinics", but that sounds even worse. It's the same sort of reasoning that brings us the non-word "blogosphere", modelled on the word "atmosphere" that is actually "atmo" + "sphere" - giving the non-word you're looking for as "blogsphere", not "blogosphere"...

Interesting Article, but not a major breakthrough

[Anonymous Coward]

As a graduate student who studies semiconductor spintronics, I'd have a hard time calling this a major breakthrough. It's an interesting paper, but it basically adds incrementally to previous work involving spins in silicon. In particular, see references [10] and [11] in the APL article. Reference [10] was the first paper to demonstrate spin transport in silicon and was published in an issue of Nature. See: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2007.174

I'd like to add that the farther along in my science career I've gotten, the more I've realized just how abysmal most science writing is. Of course, it's not an easy task trying to convey the motivation behind a highly technical experiment or field of study to someone who typically doesn't know much more about science than what they learned in high school, but it really has made me wonder how accurate the interpretations and conclusions of other, non-science news article are.