Progress in spintronics

The discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) by Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert in 1988, which was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2007, initiated an upsurge of experimental and theoretical investigations on spin dependent transport phenomena. Since then, spin valves have been introduced, switching via spin torque was proposed and confirmed, the tunneling magneto-resistance effect has matured to marketability, and magnetic domain walls and their propagation are being developed for memory storage devices with enhanced density. This field, which embraces spin-structures and spin-transport on the nanoscale, was coined spin electronics or short spintronics. A brief overview on the development of spintronics from the early discovery of the GMR effect to the present activities is provided.