Spintronics

Media for data storage necessitate higher and higher storage densities to handle the increasing amount of data. Innovative concepts like spintronics establish possibilities to satisfy these requirements und to associate a large variety of different research areas. Center of these research projects is the electron spin and in this context materials with a high spin polarization and high magnetoresistance effects.

Therefore, ferromagnetic materials are necessary. Particularly well suited are materials with high spin polarizations. Materials that show electronic conductivity in only one spin direction represent the ideal case. These materials with 100 % spin polarization are referred to as half-metallic ferromagnets. In one spin direction they show metallic and in the other direction semiconducting behavior.

G.A. Prinz, Science 282 (1998) 1160