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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."
Quantum Teleportation. It's all the rage in Los Alamos.
The game.
Thanks very much! Wish the PR release and abstract had been more informative.
What's the argument for there being potentially far less dissipative losses with pure spin currents, however? It's still going to interact with the lattice via spin-orbit and spin-spin coupling terms, no? You're still going to get resistive heating, no? Is it just the fact that the magnetic dipole interactions are much shorter range interactions than the Coulomb force? (Except wouldn't it be a screened Coulomb force in the lattice anyway?)
Spin-orbit can still be quite strong yes, but it is very dependant on the material. An interesting way to think about it is that when you have a standard piece of conducting material, it's not that there is no current flowing in it while it sits there not hooked up to a source; actually the electrons go all over the place inside the material. Current flows right to left, left to right, but it all balances out and there is no net current. Resistive heating only occurs when you have net charge current. In an ideal spintronics device you would have charged currents flowing just like in any other material, but there would be no NET charge current. The spin current can diffuse along your channel. Why is this better in terms of heat? I'd have to check, but I think you're on the right track with the magnetic dipole being much weaker than an electric monopole. 1/r^4 vs 1/r^2 IIRC. One of the major benefits occurs if you can pass a coherent spin current along a channel. This leads to the possibility of quantum computations involving spins.