Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are the first to directly utilize orbital currents without the need for conversion of the orbital current into a spin current.

“We have thus realized the first purely orbitronic device approach,” said Dr. Christin Schmitt, a scientist in the research group of Professor Mathias Kläui at the JGU Institute of Physics.

Orbitronics is a promising technology for future memory devices, as it could enable the realization of large-scale storage media with extremely low energy consumption. It is based on orbital moments, which can be described in simplified terms as the quantum-mechanical “vortices” of electrons around atomic nuclei, as well as orbital currents, i.e., the movement of these circulations through an electrical conductor.