The Spin Behind Modern Electronics 
 Professor Christoph Boehme – Physics & Astronomy For more than half a century, the development of new and better semiconductor materials has driven the continuous innovation in electronic devices like computers and cell phones. “Better semiconductors” are materials with fewer impurities (“nanodirt”), missing atoms, or defects (“nanocracks”) which slow down or even destroy electric current, limiting performance. The way defects affect materials frequently involves a property of electrons that physicists call “spin”. Spin makes electrons act like tiny magnets with a north and a south pole. This talk is about using spin and magnetism to find out which culprits make an electronic material worse, how exactly they do this, and how to fix this.