Fresh Spin On Logic  MIT team paves way for a spintronics
microprocessor  Photo: Donna Coveney/MIT   MIT’s Jagadeesh
Moodera [left] has a material that transmits spin currents at
room temperature.  In the last few years, a new type of memory
has begun to penetrate the market for nonvolatile data storage.
The devices exploit a fundamental yet abstract and elusive
property of ­electrons called spin. Because it ­underlies
permanent magnetism, spin can be thought of as analogous to
­rotation, with a kind of nanoworld angular momentum. An
electron’s spin is proportional to its magnetic momentum, and so
when spin-polarized electrical currents flow through different
types of magnetized metal, resistance changes can be exploited
to store information.  Even more interesting would be a
microprocessor using spin. In principle, a device that encoded
information using the orientation of electrons could handle data
thousands of times as fast as the present-day processors that
rely only on charge. ”Instead of an electron be