Si and Ge based spintronic materials

一种称为自旋电子学的新型电子学利用了电子的一种称为自旋的量子力学性质。 电子自旋类似于旋转的陀螺，可以顺时针或逆时针旋转。 同样，电子的自旋可以指向上或下。 自旋电子学的思想是利用上下电子作为两个二进制状态来存储信息。 使用电子自旋来存储信息的优点是，在铁磁材料中，不需要功率来保持材料内部的自旋方向。 这与传统的电子产品相反，传统的电子产品通过在晶体管上积累电荷来存储信息，如果电源关闭，这些电荷就会迅速泄漏。 如果计算机的随机存取存储器是由自旋电子元件制成的，那么在电源故障后就不需要重新启动计算机，因为电子自旋将保留所有信息。 由于不需要功率来将信息保持在存储器中，因此自旋电子器件将消耗少得多的功率，这对于便携式电子器件特别重要。

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.