Spin-based electronics: New material successfully tested

Spintronics is an emerging field of electronics, where devices work by manipulating the spin of electrons rather than the current generated by their motion. This field can offer significant advantages to computer technology. Controlling electron spin can be achieved with materials called 'topological insulators', which conduct electrons only across their surface but not through their interior. One such material, samarium hexaboride (SmB6), has long been theorized to be an ideal and robust topological insulator, but this has never been shown practically. Publishing in Nature Communications, scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute, the IOP (Chinese Academy of Science) and Hugo Dil's team at EPFL, have demonstrated experimentally, for the first time, that SmB6 is indeed a topological insulator.