Spin Transport in Nondegenerate Si with a Spin MOSFET Structure at Room Temperature

Although the traditional metal-on-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) has been a workhorse in information processing for decades, we must now consider its successor. To make spintronics a reality, by analogy we need a ``spin MOSFET''. The authors demonstrate room-temperature operation of just such a device, in which a flow of spin angular momentum in nondegenerate silicon is controlled by an external gate voltage.