Spin gating of mesoscopic devices

Inefficient screening of electric fields in nanoconductors makes electric manipulation of electronic trans- port in nanodevices possible. Accordingly, electrostatic (charge) gating is routinely used to affect and control the Coulomb electrostatics and quantum interference in modern nanodevices. Besides their charge, another (quantum mechanical) property of electrons—their spin—is at the heart of modern spintronics, a term implying that a number of magnetic and electrical properties of small systems are simultaneously harvested for device applications. In this review the possibility to achieve “spin-gating” of mesoscopic devices, i.e. the possibility of an external spin control of the electronic properties of nanode- vices is discussed. Rather than the Coulomb interaction, which is responsible for electric-charge gating, we consider two other mechanisms for spin gating. These are on the one hand the magnetic exchange interaction in magnetic devices and on the other hand the spin–orbit coupling (“Rashba effect”), which is prominent in low dimensional conductors. A number of different phenomena demonstrating the spin gating phenomenon will be discussed, including the spintro-mechanics of magnetic shuttling, Rashba spin splitting, and spin-gated weak superconductivity.