Valleytronics

Valleytronics is a portmanteau combining the terms valley and electronics. The term refers to the technology of control over the valley degree of freedom (a local maximum/minimum on the valence/conduction band) of certain semiconductors that present multiple valleys inside the first Brillouin zone—known as multivalley semiconductors. The term was coined in analogy to the blooming field of spintronics. While in spintronics the internal degree of freedom of spin is harnessed to store, manipulate and read out bits of information, the proposal for valleytronics is to perform similar tasks using the multiple extrema of the band structure, so that the information of 0s and 1s would be stored as different discrete values of the crystal momentum.