Ron Jansen from the Spintronics Research Center at the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) gives an interesting lecture about recent progress in silicon spintronics:
Researcher Michel de Jong of the NanoElectronics group (MESA+) in the University of Twente (Netherlands) received a â¬1.5 million grant from the European Research Council to fund his Spintronics work (this is his second ERC grant). Michel de Jong is focusing on organic materials, in particular in Buckyballs (spherical C60 molecules held together by weak bonds) sandwiched between two magnetic materials.
Michel explains that these molecules have very little effect on electron spin, which is a great advantage as it enables them to store spin information for much longer periods of time than silicon. Buckyballs have also been used to create Graphene Quantum Dots.