In conventional electronics, information is encoded in bits (0 or 1) by the presence or absence of electron charges. A promising new approach—spintronics—aims to use the electron ‘spin’ as an information carrier. This method takes advantage of the orientation (up or down) of the electron spin to encode information. The speed at which electronics operate continues to increase and is expected to work at terahertz speeds in the future. To be competitive and compatible with charge- based electronics, spintronic operations must, therefore, also work at these high frequencies.
An elementary [more...]

Heating a ferromagnet beyond some critical temperature leads to loss of magnetic properties. The precise mechanism and time-scale of the process remained undescribed. A team of scientists from Berlin (Fritz Haber Inst., FU Physics Dept., TU Inst. for Optics & Atomic Physics, Max Born Inst.), Dresden (Helmholtz Center), Uppsala (Dept. of Physics and Astronomy), St. Petersburg (Ioffe Inst.), and Sendai, Japan (inst. of Materials Research) have now revealed the elementary steps of this process
The [more...]