Spintronics / Spin electronics

Spintronics in which charge and spin degrees of freedom of electrons can be used simultaneously in order to produce devices with new functionality have became subjects of growing interest. In spintronics electron spins must be conserved in time and spatially. Thus, the spintronics device dimension should be smaller than the spin diffusion length and spin relaxation time, which requires nano technology. The giant magnetoresistance (GMR) and tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) are mainly used in spintronics as physical basis. The GMR and low resistive TMR materials have been commercialized in HDD as read heads. The TMR materials are also strongly expected to be applied to Magnetoresistive Random Access Memories (MRAMs).

Fig. 1 Concepts and applications of spintronics.

Spintronics is also paid attention to semiconductor fields such as spin-FET, spin transistor, spin quantum computer, magnetic semiconductors devices etc. However, these research fields are in basic stage at present.