Spintronics refers to the use of a fundamental property of particles which experts refer to as the spin for information processing. Furthermore, spintronics is analogous to electronics in many ways, which instead uses the electron’s electrical charge. Also, carrying information in both the charge and spin of an electron provides a much better functionality diversity to devices.
Introduction to Spintronics
Spintronics or spin electronics is the study of the role that the spin of an electron plays in the solid-state physics and other devices that facilitate the exploitation of spin properties. Experts also call spintronics as spin Flextronics and it is the study of the intrinsic spin of the electrons along with its association to the magnetic moment. Spin Flextronics also deals with the fundamental electronic charge in solid-state devices.
An example of spintronics is the spin transport and spin relaxation in semiconductors and metals, which play a crucial role in solid-state physics issues. Moreover, the inclusion of such solid state physics issues takes place in the fundamental spintronics research along with new technology whose implementation takes place in the electronic storage technology.
Spintronics Explained
Due to the spintronics, creation of a prototype device, giant-magneto resistive (GMR) sandwich structure, has taken place. Also, the use of this prototype takes place in the industry as a memory-storage cell and a read head. The giant-magneto resistive (GMR) sandwich structure is characterized by alternating ferromagnetic and non-magnetic metal layers.
Depending on the relative orientation of the magnetization in the magnetic layers, change takes place in device resistance from small parallel magnetizations to large antiparallel magnetizations.
Experts use this change in resistance to sense changes that take place in magnetic fields. Furthermore, the identification of the electron spin can take place as a magnetic field having up and down positions. As such, conventional high and low logic values, whose representation takes place by simple currents, are provided with an extra two binary states.
Theory of Spintronics
The spin of the electron is an intrinsic angular momentum that has a separation from the angular momentum because of its orbital motion. Furthermore, the magnitude of the projection of the electron’s spin along an arbitrary axis happens to be \({\displaystyle {\tfrac {1}{2}}\hbar }\).
This implies that the electron, by the spin-statistics theorem, acts as a fermion. Furthermore, like orbital angular momentum, the spin has an association with the magnetic moment just like orbital angular momentum. Most noteworthy, the magnitude of the magnetic moment is as:
\(\displaystyle \mu ={\tfrac {\sqrt {3}}{2}}{\frac {q}{m_{e}}}\hbar\)
In a solid, the spins of many electrons can act together so as to influence the material’s electronic and magnetic properties. For example, endowing it with a permanent magnetic moment, just what happens with a ferromagnet.
Electron spins in most materials exist equally in both the up and the down states. Moreover, there is no dependency of transport properties on the spin. Furthermore, there is a requirement by the spintronic device manipulation or generation of a spin-polarized population of electrons.
This results in an excess of electrons characterized by spin up or spin down. Also, one may express the polarization of any spin-dependent property X as
\(P_{X}={\frac {X_{\uparrow }-X_{\downarrow }}{X_{\uparrow }+X_{\downarrow }}}\).
FAQs For Spintronics
Question 1: What are Spintronics uses?
Answer 1: Spintronics uses are as follows:
- Use of spintronic devices takes place in the field of mass-storage devices.
- It is used for the compression of massive amounts of data into a small area. For example, one can store roughly 1 TB data on a single-sided 3.5″ diameter disc.
- Use of spintronics takes place in the medical field for the detection of cancer.
- Spintronics technology, in general, is quite promising for digital electronics. Furthermore, its testing has taken place in hard drives, which are mass-storage components.
Question 2: Explain some metal-based spintronics devices?
Answer 2: Some metal-based spintronics devices are as follows:
- Tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR), where the achievement of CPP transport is by making use of quantum-mechanical tunnelling of electrons through a thin insulator that separates ferromagnetic layers.
- Spin-transfer torque, where the use of a current of spin-polarized electrons takes place to control the magnetization direction of the device’s ferromagnetic electrodes.
- Spin-wave logic devices carry information. Furthermore, the information is carried in the phase. Performance of logic operations can take place by interference and spin-wave scattering.
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