I’m not really good at it, but here is my analogy:
Think of ‘normal electron flow’ as a pinball in a channel, traveling down the channel.
Think of the ‘Spin current’ as a group of stationary pinballs in an egg carton’s (the insulator) depressions.
Now, place the ‘normal electron flow’ channel with its pinball parallel to the egg carton.
Each of the pinballs in the egg carton will ‘spin’ in a particular direction as the traveling pinball passes by.
The pinballs/electrons in the egg carton will each interact with the passing electron, depending on its ‘state’ when it passes by.
Now that you have 12 pinballs, some spinning clockwise, and some spinning counterclockwise, you can ‘read’ those states with a sensor to determine what state they are in.
You now have a 12 bit register that can hold and transfer information to a computing device.
The problem previously has been that the insulator/egg carton itself would get some magnetism as well as the electrons and hold on to it, interacting with the stationary electrons like the one passing by, making the reading of the individual electrons’ spins difficult or intermittent.
There isn’t supposed to be any ‘flow’ from the traveling electrons to the stationary ones. Very little current is necessary to achieve this spin. And even less is needed to detect the spin. Thus you have a device that uses almost no energy or very little to be used in a quantum computer.
This may be totally wrong, but that’s the way I understand it......................
10-4 Thanks. That helps.
I think I have a rudimentary grip on it now.
Instead on the use of a transistor which most agree has reached it’s minimum size possible and still have isolated current, This could be reduced to a much smaller state due to lack of any physical contact requires.
Information transmitted by the state of a single electron.
Holy Moly, very cool!