Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The directional manipulation of spin waves, a long-awaited technique in spintronics, has now been realized by shaping a light pulse. Takuya Satoh from the University of Tokyo talked to Nature Photonics about the technique.
Assumptions, educated guesses and intuition are often unavoidably involved in the study of new phenomena, and scientists may therefore make mistakes at the outset. However, this is part of the research process and sometimes brilliant mistakes can lead to unexpected discoveries.