Spintronics - Making it work!

This week, we're learning about spintronics - manipulating the spins of individual electrons to store information. Unfortunately, electron spins tend to "reset" (lose the spin orientation that we set up) after only a hundred picoseconds (a picosecond = 10^-12 seconds), which is too short to be read by our computer processors. (Remember: period = 1/frequency! So, for example, a 1 gigahertz processor would need the spins to have a lifetime of at least 1/(10^9 Hz) = 10^-9 seconds.) 

Fortunately, in 2012, IBM announced they had successfully synchronized the spins of clusters of electrons, increasing the spin lifetime by a factor of 30.

Here's an example of their data (with time increasing as you move up the vertical axis), showing that the spins remain coherent for just over a nanosecond - enough time to be useful to a 1 gigahertz processor!

http://www.computerworld.com/common/images/site/features/2012/06/Spintronics%20photo1.jpeg