Electrons trip on tiny semiconductor steps

Increasingly, engineers refer to the heads that read computer hard disks as “spintronics devices.” That’s because these sensors use the orientations of electrons’ magnetic fields, or spins, to read the ones and zeros of digital information.

Electrons’ spins flip least often (blue) on flat semiconductor surface and most often (red) in a 10-nanometer-wide swath near a 5-nm-tall step (not visible).