Discovery of giant planar Hall effect could herald a generation of 'spintronics'
A basic discovery in magnetic semiconductors could result in a new generation of devices for sensors and memory applications — and perhaps, ultimately, quantum computation — physicists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara have announced. The new phenomenon, called the giant planar Hall effect, has to do with what happens when the spins of current-carrying electrons are manipulated. For several years scientists have been engaged in exploiting electron spin for the creation of a new generation of electronic devices –hence the term “spintronics” — and the Caltech-UCSB breakthrough offers a new route to realizing such devices.