BACKGROUND Non-equilibrium charge transport in superconductors has been investigated intensely in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the vicinity of the critical temperature. Much less attention has been paid to low temperatures and the role of the quasiparticle spin. RESULTS We report here on nonlocal transport in superconductor hybrid structures at very low temperatures. By comparing the nonloc...

This article discusses spin transport in systems with spin-orbit interactions and how it can be understood in a semiclassical picture. I will first present a semiclassical wave-packet description of spin transport, which explains how the microscopic motion of carriers gives rise to a spin current. Due to spin non-conservation the definition of the spin current has some arbitrariness. In the sec...

Most future information processing techniques using electron spins in non-magnetic semiconductors will require both the manipulation and transfer of spins without their coherence being lost. The spin-orbit effective magnetic field induced by drifting electrons enables us to rotate the electron spins in the absence of an external magnetic field. However, the fluctuations in the effective magneti...

Constraints on spin observables coming from discrete symmetries such as P, C, T and identical particles may be divided in two types: 1) classical ones, which insure the invariance of the cross sections under the symmetry operation; 2) non-classical ones, which can only be obtained at the level of amplitudes. Similarly, positivity constraints can be divided into classical and non-classical const...

In this sketch, I focus on Physics and formalism behind dynamical polarisabilities, a new tool to test and interpret quantitative predictions about the low-energy degrees of freedom inside the nucleon from the multipoles of Compton scattering for photon energies below 300 MeV. A way to extract them from double-polarised precision experiments is sketched. Predictions from Chiral Effective Field ...

Selected problems of fundamental importance for spintronics and spin-polarized transport are reviewed, some of them with a special emphasis on their applications in quantum computing and coherent control of quantum dynamics. The role of the solid-state environment in the decoherence of electron spins is discussed. In particular, the limiting effect of the spin-orbit interaction on spin relaxati...

Spintronics relies on the ability to transport and use the spin properties of an electron rather than its charge. We describe a spin ratchet at the single-electron level that produces spin currents with no net bias or charge transport. Our device is based on the ground-state energetics of a single-electron transistor comprising a superconducting island connected to normal leads via tunnel barri...

The localisation of oskar mRNA to the posterior of the Drosophila oocyte defines where the abdomen and germ cells form in the embryo. Kinesin 1 transports oskar mRNA to the oocyte posterior along a polarised microtubule cytoskeleton that grows from non-centrosomal microtubule organising centres (ncMTOCs) along the anterior/lateral cortex. Here, we show that the formation of this polarised micro...