Your home computer, your car stereo, and your workplace copy machine - electronics all - operate using the movement of charge-carrying electrons. Although we've done quite well exploiting the electron's charge, scientists are working on harnessing another, more obscure property of the tiny particle - its spin. In Friday's issue of the journal Science, researchers discuss the state of the art in "spintronics," and the challenges that must be met before this new breed of electronics can power a variety of future devices.
"Spin" is a convenient term for a property of the electron (and other subatomic particles) that's tricky to describe outside the quantum realm. In general, spin refers to the angular momentum - the rotational momentum - of a particle that creates its own tiny magnetic field. Spin comes in two flavors: "spin-up" and "spin-down." When a collection of electrons are all spinning the same way, either up or down, the tiny magnetic fields associated with each electron can add up to one large magnetic moment. Magnetism in some materials such as iron, for instance, comes in part from the cumulative orientation of spin in all the electrons in the material.
Just like the positive/negative duo of charge, the 0s and 1s of current information technology, this up/down pairing makes spin an attractive possibility for encoding and carrying information electronically. The additional information pathway represented by spin will boost the performance of electronic products, leading to smaller and faster devices that don't consume as much power as traditional electronics, says Science author Stuart
No comments:
Post a Comment