By Peter Weiss
Increasingly, engineers refer to the heads that read computer hard disks as “spintronics devices.” That’s because these sensors use the orientations of electrons’ magnetic fields, or spins, to read the ones and zeros of digital information.
If scientists could extend spintronics to semiconductor chips, faster, cooler-running, lower-power devices might result. However, efforts to make spintronic components have stalled because electrons injected into semiconductors often don’t maintain their up or down spin orientations.