Latest Nature announces "spintronic" breakthrough (excerpt):
Researchers eager to use individual molecules as the components of ultra-small electronic circuits and computers have put a new spin on their ambitious goal.
They take advantage of a hitherto unexploited property of electric currents, called spin, to make molecular devices that operate under new rules. This fledgling form of electronics, called spintronics, could lead to computers that don't forget anything when their power is turned off, and perhaps even to that ultra-powerful device, the quantum computer.
Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and co-workers have made a prototype spintronics device called a spin valve, in which the electrical current passes from one terminal to the other through individual carbon-based molecules.
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