By Peter Weiss
Besides possessing an electric charge, every electron totes around a tiny magnetic field that points either up or down. The particle’s magnetism arises from a quantum mechanical property called spin. Now, an international team of physicists has induced spins to flow without an accompanying flow of charge.
That feat could prove important to the burgeoning field of spintronics, which aims to control spin currents much as the field of electronics controls charge currents, says Henry M. van Driel of the University of Toronto (SN: 2/22/03, p. 118: Available to subscribers at Electronic Acrobats: Tidily tweaking electrons’ twirls).