Physiker übertragen Elektronenspin auf Photonen – Ein Physikerteam hat elektrische Impulse verwendet, um magnetische Informationen in ein polarisiertes Lichtsignal umzuwandeln – eine Entdeckung, die die optische Telekommunikation über große Entfernungen, auch zwischen Erde und Mars, revolutionieren könnte.

From the article

>A team of physicists led by Dr. Yuan Lu from the Université de Lorraine’s Institut Jean Lamour has used electrical pulses to manipulate magnetic information into a polarized light signal — a discovery that could revolutionize long-distance optical telecommunications, including between Earth and Mars. The breakthrough involves the field of spintronics, which aims to manipulate the spin of electrons in order to store and process information.

Also from the article

>In spintronics, which has been used successfully in magnetic computer hard drives, information is represented by electron spin and, by its proxy, the direction of magnetization.
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>Ferromagnets, such as iron or cobalt, have an unequal number of electrons whose spins are oriented either along or against the magnetization axis.
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>Electrons with spin along the magnetization travel smoothly across a ferromagnet, while those with opposite spin orientation are bounced around. This represents binary information, 0 and 1.
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>The resulting change of the resistance is the key principle for spintronic devices, whose magnetic state, which can be considered as stored information, is maintained indefinitely.

Finally we can communicate with Mars, which is the ultimate goal of this type of research!