With apologies to Isaac Asimov, the most exciting phase to hear in science isn't "Eureka," but "That's funny..." A "that's funny" moment in a Colorado State University physics lab has led to a fundamental discovery that could play a key role in next-generation microelectronics.
Publishing in Nature Physics April 25, the scientists, led by Professor of Physics Mingzhong Wu in CSU's College of Natural Sciences, are the first to demonstrate using non-polarized light to produce in a metal what's called a spin voltage - a unit of power produced from the quantum spinning of an individual electron. Controlling electron spins for use in memory and logic applications is a relatively new field called spin electronics, or spintronics, and the subject of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Wu and his group's passion is to find new, better ways to control electron spins, the physics of which isn't completely understood. Spintronics exploits the notion that electron spins can be manipulated and used to process and store information, with a fraction of the power needed in ubiquitous, conventional electronics.
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