Nanotechnology + Superconductivity = Spintronics

karvind writes "Spintronics is a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron's charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron's intrinsic spin and if a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips--including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations. PhysOrg is reporting that University of Notre Dame physicist Boldizsar Janko and his colleagues have found a way to achieve this control using a magnetic semiconductor, insulator and superconducting material stack of thicknesses of order of few dozen nanometers. IBM and Stanford are also looking into spintronics."

Need Wikipedia Update?

[Silverlancer]

Seems like one of the Unsolved Problems in Physics [wikipedia.org] isn't exactly unsolved anymore.

So, what, Base 4 Computing?

[Ledneh]

I know this isn't exactly what the article said, but I had a thought. If computers could base data on spin and charge at the same time (4 possibilities), would there be any significant advantage to being able to work natively in base 4 instead of base 2?

Re:So, what, Base 4 Computing?

[Quantum Fizz]

No, not if the four basis states are no electrons, spin up electrons, spin down electrons, and both kinds of electrons.

Base four is nice because many hardware/software algorithms can be used since groups of two bits have 4 states, and a base-4 'bit' can be thought of as two independent bits.