Focus on Spintronics and Spin Physics

Spintronics: Taming spin currents.

T aking advantage of the fact that electrons, photons and some elementary excitations have an intrinsic angular momentum (spin) offers a fascinating opportunity to study materials properties. Introducing a net imbalance between spins pointing in different directions (say, 'up' and 'down') is one way to probe phenomena including spin–orbit and hyperfine coupling, pairing of unconventional superc...

Spin-polarized supercurrents for spintronics

8 Spintronics — Spin - Based Electronics

Spintronics is an acronym for a spin transport electronics and was originally used as a name for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program. In 1994, DARPA started to develop magnetic field sensors and memory based on the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect and spindependent tunneling. The overall goal for the Spintronics program was to create a new generation of electronic ...

Theoretical Perspectives on Spintronics and Spin-Polarized Transport

Selected problems of fundamental importance for spintronics and spin-polarized transport are reviewed, some of them with a special emphasis on their applications in quantum computing and coherent control of quantum dynamics. The role of the solid-state environment in the decoherence of electron spins is discussed. In particular, the limiting effect of the spin-orbit interaction on spin relaxati...

Spintronics: electron spin coherence, entanglement, and transport

The prospect of building spintronic devices in which electron spins store and transport information has attracted strong attention in recent years. Here we present some of our representative theoretical results on three fundamental aspects of spintronics: spin coherence, spin entanglement, and spin transport. In particular, we discuss our detailed quantitative theory for spin relaxation and coh...