Spintronics demistified   Spins on a finite-size frustrated
lattice: a Mo72Fe30 supramolecular magnet Source: ILL
Spintronics might be the future of electronics, but what is it?
In short, it is a way of getting over a fundamental limitation
in electronics: that electrons have charge and every time a
charge is moved to do something, some of the effort gets turned
into heat.  Quite separately from charge, electrons have a
property called spin, and it is this property that might one day
be exploited in spintronics to move information without losing
so much energy.  So, what is spin?  “An electron has charge
which is electrical and spin which is magnetic. In spintronics,
we would use spin in addition to charge,” Dr Paul Steffens, a
neutron scientist studying magnetism at the ILL neutron lab in
Grenoble. “Magnetism can come from loop of current: a loop of
wire, or an electron circling an atom, or an electron’s magnetic
moment. It is not completely absurd to think of spin as a little
current loop. It is a picture