Nobel Lecture: Origin, development, and future of spintronics
Nobel Lecture: Origin, development, and future of spintronics
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DOI：
10.1103/revmodphys.80.1517
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发表时间：
2008-10-01
影响因子：
44.1
通讯作者：
Fert, Albert
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fert, Albert
电子有电荷和自旋，但直到最近，电荷和自旋一直被分开考虑。在传统电子学中，电荷由电场操纵，但自旋被忽略。其他经典技术，例如磁记录，正在使用自旋，但仅通过其宏观表现，即铁磁体的磁化。这一情况在1988年开始改变，当时发现（Baibich等人，1988; Binash等人，1989）的磁性多层膜的巨磁阻（GMR）开辟了通过磁化方向作用于电子自旋来有效控制电子运动的途径。这迅速引发了一个新的研究和技术领域的发展，今天称为自旋电子学，像GMR一样，利用自旋对铁磁材料中电子迁移率的影响。实际上，Mott（1936）首先提出的自旋对铁磁金属中电子迁移率的影响，在我的博士论文中已经得到了实验证明和理论描述。在1988年发现之前的近20年。GMR是利用这种影响力来控制电流的第一步。它在硬盘读头上的应用极大地促进了存储信息密度的快速上升，并导致了硬盘技术向消费电子产品的延伸。然后，自旋电子学的发展揭示了许多与自旋流的控制和操纵有关的其他现象。今天，这一研究领域正在大大扩展，出现了非常有前途的新方向，如自旋转移现象、半导体自旋电子学、分子自旋电子学或单电子自旋电子学。
Electrons have a charge and a spin, but until recently, charges and spins have been considered separately. In conventional electronics, the charges are manipulated by electric fields but the spins are ignored. Other classical technologies, magnetic recording, for example, are using the spin but only through its macroscopic manifestation, the magnetization of a ferromagnet. This picture started to change in 1988 when the discovery (Baibich et al., 1988; Binash et al., 1989) of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) of the magnetic multilayers opened the way to an efficient control of the motion of the electrons by acting on their spin through the orientation of a magnetization. This rapidly triggered the development of a new field of research and technology, today called spintronics and, like the GMR, exploiting the influence of the spin on the mobility of the electrons in ferromagnetic materials. Actually, the influence of the spin on the mobility of the electrons in ferromagnetic metals, first suggested by Mott (1936), had been experimentally demonstrated and theoretically described in my Ph. D. thesis almost 20 years before the discovery of 1988. The GMR was the first step on the road of the exploitation of this influence to control an electrical current. Its application to the read heads of hard disks greatly contributed to the fast rise in the density of stored information and led to the extension of the hard disk technology to consumer’s electronics. Then, the development of spintronics revealed many other phenomena related to the control and manipulation of spin currents. Today this field of research is expanding considerably, with very promising new axes like the phenomena of spin transfer, spintronics with semiconductors, molecular spintronics, or single-electron spintronics.