The effects of spin-orbit interaction on charge transport

摘要

As the information and communications technology industries continue to demand smaller and more powerful electronic devices, it is becoming clear that the technologies which we currently rely upon to store, process and encode data are no longer sufficient. Over the past two decades, the field of spintronics has emerged as a promising source of the new technologies that will help to meet these needs.rnFollowing the discovery of giant magnetoresistance in the late 1980s research originally focused on achieving larger and larger magnetoresi stance effects in metal-based systems. The resulting devices have already found widespread applications (as read heads in hard drives, for example) and more recent developments (spin torque, domain wall effects) demonstrate a similarly large potential.