Nobel Lecture by Professor Albert Fert

Meet Albert Fert, Nobel Prize in physics 2007.

 

The Origin and the Development of Spintronics

Spintronics, at the interface between magnetism and electronics, is a research field in considerable expansion. It takes its roots in results of fundamental research on the electrical conduction in ferromagnetic conductors and its development followed the discovery og the Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) of the magnetic multilayers in 1988. Its bacis concept is the manipulation of spin currents, in contrast to mainstream electronics in which the spin of the electron is ignored.

After an introduction on the fundamentals of spin dependent conduction, the GMR and the applications of GMR, I will focus on the most recent developments of spintronics. This will include a review of results on spin transfer (magnetic switching or generation of microwave oscillations by injection of spin angular momentum from an electrical current), spintronics with semiconductors and molecular spintronics. The synchronization and phase locking of a collection of STO's (Spin Transfer Oscillators) is an example of an important new problem raised by the progress in the generation of microwave oscillations by spin transfer. Finally the natural evolution of spintronics towards nanospintronics will be illustrated by recent results on single-electron spintronics.