Professor Giovanni Vignale
Department of Physics 
University of Missouri-Columbia 

Many body effects in spintronics 

Spintronics is a new branch of electronics, which attempts to create devices that exploit the spin of the electron to perform logical and memory operations. These devices operate on spinpolarized currents, which are much more strongly affected by electronelectron interactions than their unpolarized counterparts. In this talk I show how the many-body correlation between electrons of opposite spin orientations leads to an unusual form of internal friction for spinpolarized currents - the spin Coulomb drag - which affects virtually all aspects of spin transport in metals and semiconductors.