It’s an important emerging field, spintronics; though it’s not too well known. It’s based on a quantum property of electrons – they spin. Some electrons spin ‘up,’ some spin ‘down’ and if you can get a device to read that state of up or down, that’s the basis for many kinds of electronics. This includes computers where the spin up or down is easily analogous to the on or off of binary electronics. So spintronics has great potential. There’s one interesting caveat, until recently no one has actually seen an electron spin. Now in the journal Nature Technology physicists at Ohio University (USA) and the University of Hamburg (Germany) have produced the first images of electron spin.

The imagery was captured with a highly customized microscope with an iron-coated tip to manipulate cobalt atoms on a plate of manganese. The type of microscope, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), produces images down to the atomic level. In this case, the ‘scope was used to position individual cobalt atoms on the manganese surface in order to change their electrons’ direction of spin. The images they captured showed that the atoms would appear as a single protrusion (bump) if the spin was upward and as a double protrusion if the spun was downward.

The images provide the first visual evidence of the spin property (although it’s not video and you don’t see the actual electrons turning). Equally as important, the techniques used demonstrate the ability to manipulate spin, which will be necessary for future development in quantum computing or other spintronics devices.

“Different directions in spin can mean different states for data storage,” said Saw-Wai Hla, an associate professor of physics and astronomy in Ohio University’s Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute and one of the primary investigators on the study. “The memory devices of current computers involve tens of thousands of atoms. In the future, we may be able to use one atom and change the power of the computer by the thousands.”

[Source: Ohio University]

The future is ‘down the road a bit’ for spintronics. For instance, in this case the experiments were conducted with materials cooled to 10 degrees Kelvin. That’s just ten degrees above absolute zero. The same techniques will need to work at room temperatures before computers and other real-world electronics can be built with spintronics.