New spin on graphene

Scientists including an MIT physics professor have found a way to make wonder material graphene magnetic, opening up a new range of opportunities for the world's thinnest material in the area of spintronics. The collaboration, led by the University of Manchester, showed that electric current - a flow of electrons - can magnetize graphene. The results could be a potentially huge breakthrough in the field of spintronics. MIT physics professor Leonid Levitov is a member of the research team, along with scientists from Princeton, the Netherlands and Japan. Spintronics is a group of emerging technologies that exploit the intrinsic spin of the electron, in addition to its fundamental electric charge that is exploited in microelectronics. Billions of spintronics devices such as sensors and memories are already being produced. Every hard disk drive has a magnetic sensor that uses a flow of spins, and magnetic random access memory (MRAM) chips are becoming increasingly popular.