CPM Seminar

I will provide an elementary introduction to the emerging field of spintronics in this talk. Active control of carrier spin in nanostructures of semiconductors and other electronic materials is projected to lead to new device functionalities in the future. In particular, it may be possible to envision memory and logic operations being carried out on the same `spintronic' chip. I will discuss various aspects of fundamental physics related to this new research area of spin electronics with the particular emphasis on spin-polarized transport and spin electronic materials (e.g. ferromagnetic semiconductors). A revolutionary possibility in the (perhaps, far) future is using the natural two-level dynamics of electron spin to create robust quantum bits (`qubits') which could be used to carry out solid state quantum information processing or quantum computation. I will discuss the question of entanglement, decoherence, quantum error correction, and quantum gates in semiconductor nanostructure-based solid state spin quantum computer architectures.

Thursday, October 31st 2002, 15:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 114