Just skip the messy chemical stuff.

The device created by University of Miami Physicist Stewart E. Barnes, of the College of Arts and Sciences and his collaborators can store energy in magnets rather than through chemical reactions. Like a winding up toy car, the spin battery is "wound up" by applying a large magnetic field --no chemistry involved. The device is potentially better than anything found so far, said Barnes.

"We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected," Barnes said. "That this was counterintuitive is what lead to our theoretical understanding of what was really going on." . . .

The secret behind this technology is the use of nano-magnets to induce an electromotive force. . . The electrical current made in this process is called a spin polarized current and finds use in a new technology called "spintronics." . . .

This seems promising, but "spintronics" isn't a new technology.

In spintronics, information is stored and transmitted using another property of electrons: their spin. Spin is a difficult concept to explain. Technically, spin is the intrinsic angular momentum of a particle. But an easier way to describe spin is to imagine that each electron contains a tiny bar magnet, like a compass needle, that points either up or down to represent the electron's spin.

Electrons moving through a nonmagnetic material normally have random spins (half are up and half are down) so the net effect is zero. But magnetic fields can be applied so that the spins are aligned (all up or all down), allowing a new way to store binary data in the form of ones (spins all up) and zeroes (spins all down).

Shi says the field of spintronics was born in the late 1980s with the discovery of the "giant magnetoresistance effect." Resistance is a measure of how much a material resists the flow of electrical current or electrons. The giant magnetoresistance effect occurs when a magnetic field is used to align the spin of electrons in the material, inducing a large change in a material's resistance.

The effect first was discovered in a device made of multiple layers of electrically conducting material: alternating magnetic and nonmagnetic layers. The device was known as a "spin valve" because when a magnetic field was applied to the device, the spin of its electrons went from all up to all down, changing its resistance so that the device acted like a valve to increase or decrease the flow of electrical current.

Conventional spin valves have been widely used in computers since the mid 1990s. . .

Compared with purely electronic computers, computers with spintronic memory should be able to store more data, consume less power and process data more quickly. Conventional computer memory has transistors that use electric charges to store data as zeroes and ones. Spintronic memory will use up and down electron spins to represent such data.

Spintronics also should make instant-on computers possible. Once the spins are aligned, they stay that way until changed by a magnetic field – even if a computer is shut off. As a result, data will be available the moment a computer is turned back on, with no need to boot up the computer to move data from the hard drive to the memory.

Read the (old, 2004) referenced release for more spintronics background, including an organic connection.

But the idea of spintronic batteries seems newish, and promising. It seems like it would be another one of those instant charge notions, rather than the long process of chemical reactions in charging common chemical batteries. If they do scale up to sizes useful for transportation then refills will be quick.

I wonder what a solar EMP event would do to spintronic devices?