Not exact matches
WHIRL AWAY
Electrons in platinum
move in different directions depending on their
spin when the metal is heated at one end.
Awschalom's team recently discovered an effect predicted 35 years ago, called the
spin Hall effect: By introducing certain chemical defects into a semiconductor,
electrons with opposite
spins can be induced to
move in opposite directions and line up on the sides of a chip.
«By twisting and controlling the molecular bonds with light,» Awschalom says, «it is possible to operate on the
electron spins as they
move through the chemical structure.»
An especially intriguing aspect of the new paper was that silicon carbide semiconductor defects have a natural affinity for
moving information between light and
spin (a magnetic property of
electrons).
But when the magnetic orientations of the wires point in opposite directions,
electrons moving through the cluster from one wire to the other must quickly flip their
spin.
These rolling
electron waves could then be described as right -
moving with
spin up, left -
moving with
spin down, and so on.
Step edges on topological crystalline insulators may lead to electrically conducting pathways where
electrons with opposite
spin spin move in converse directions — any U-turn is prohibited.
As neutrons (blue line) scatter off the graphene - like honeycomb material, they produce a magnetic Majorana fermion (green wave) that
moves through the material disrupting or breaking apart magnetic interactions between «
spinning»
electrons.