Three atom spintronic device

In today's microelectronics industry, the movement of an electron's charge has been widely exploited to create a plethora of integrated circuits, which has continued to shrink in size and increase in density year after year.

However, anticipating that this trend might not last, engineers are now looking at alternative means from which to create the microelectronic components of the future. One way they might do so is to develop electronic circuitry that uses the intrinsic spin of electrons.

Physicists at Surrey University, led by Prof Ben Murdin and Dr Steven Clowes, are trying to create such spintronic, or spin-based electronic, devices based around existing semiconductor materials.

The spin of an electron can take one of two states: either up or down. So just as the movement of the electron charge has been used to create circuits that encode data in a binary fashion, so too could future circuitry that exploits the values of the electron's spin.