Electrons have a property known as spin, and these spins can be controlled and directed by applied electric and magnetic fields. In recent years, researchers in the relatively young field of spintronics have explored this effect for applications in microelectronics [reviewed in (1)]. The goal is to control and use spins much as today's integrated circuits use the property of electric charge for computing operations. On page 766 of this issue, Konig et al. (2) report experimental results that show the existence of a new state of matter that may take spintronics even further. Not only does this work offer us a look at fundamentally new physical phenomena, it may also allow the development of novel spintronics devices.
展开▼
