Quantum Dot Spintronics: Fundamentals and Applications

Abstract

Spintronics is a generalization of electronics: Electronics means charge carrier transport, spintronics adds to this transport the supplementary degree of freedom spin which has been neglected since the roots of electronics. In this sense, spintronics is opening a new dimension of functional devices which is even more mighty than it may look at a first glance: The electron spin and its orientation is a pure quantum mechanical phenomenon which leads in its complexity to much more information coding depth and combinatorial operations than the storage and transport of charges in classical electronics. That is why the quantum bit (qubit) concept has been introduced by Schumacher [1].