Si and Ge based spintronic materials

一种名为自旋电子学的新型电子学利用了电子自旋的量子力学特性。电子自旋类似于旋转陀螺，可以顺时针或逆时针旋转。同样，电子的自旋可以向上或向下。自旋电子学的思想是使用上下电子作为信息存储的两种二进制状态。使用电子自旋来存储信息的优点是，在铁磁材料中，不需要电力来维持材料内部自旋的方向。这与传统的电子技术相反，传统的电子技术通过在晶体管上积累电荷来存储信息，如果电源关闭，晶体管就会迅速泄漏。如果计算机的随机存取存储器是由自旋电子组成的，那么在电源故障后就不需要重新启动计算机了，因为电子自旋会保留所有的信息。由于不需要电力将信息保存在存储器中，自旋电子设备将消耗更少的电力，这对便携式电子设备尤为重要。

A new form of electronics called spintronics exploits a quantum mechanical property of the electron called spin. Electron spin is analogous to a spinning top, which can rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise. Likewise, an electron's spin can either point up or down. The idea of spintronics is to use the up and down electrons as two binary states for information storage. The virtue of using electron spins to store information is that in ferromagnetic materials no power is required to maintain the direction of the spins inside the material. This is in contrast to conventional electronics, which stores information by accumulating charge on transistors that quickly leaks away if the power is turned off. If a computer's random access memory were made of spintronic components, there would be no need to reboot the computer after a power failure because the electron spins would retain all the information. Since no power is required to keep the information in memory, spintronic devices would consume much less power, which is particularly important for portable electronic devices.