Nanomagnetism and Spintronics

Book excerpt: This overview is a brief introduction to the subjects covered by this book, nanomagnetism and spintronics. The discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect is described together with a short summary of the studies prior to the experiments on GMR. Studies on various kinds of magnetoresistance (MR) effect that were inspired by the GMR effect are reviewed and recent topics are introduced. In many novel phenomena involving the interplay of electric conductance and magnetization, the role of the “spin current” has been revealed to be important and the possibility for exploiting these phenomena in spintronics devices has been suggested. Nanoscale devices are indispensable to fundamental studies on spintronics and also to various technical devices, and therefore gaining an understanding of nanomagnetism is a crucial current issue. At the end of this section, the scope of this book is described in brief with the content of each chapter.