From Earth to Mars: Transporting spin information at the speed of light

Scientists have 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, described in a study published March 27 in Nature, involves the field of spintronics, which aims to manipulate the spin of electrons in order to store and process information.

The researchers applied an electrical pulse to transfer this spin information from electrons to photons...