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Spintronics

A lucky break

The ability to harness spin polarization is critical for many semiconductor spin devices. It now seems that spin–orbit coupling with locally broken symmetry can enable a giant spin polarization in a semiconductor that is otherwise inversion symmetric.

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Figure 1: Valley-dependent spin polarization in an inversion-symmetric crystal.

References

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Correspondence to John Schaibley or Xiaodong Xu.

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Schaibley, J., Xu, X. A lucky break. Nature Phys 10, 798–799 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3138

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