The conductivity of semiconductor quantum structures is normally dominated by the charge and not by the spin of the electrons. Recent experiments on two-dimensional (quantum well), one-dimensional (quantum wire) and zero-dimensional (quantum dot) electron systems demonstrate, that also the spin of electrons may influence drastically the conductivity in these low-dimensional systems which may be important for the new fields of spintronic and quantum computing.

The talk will summarize recent experimental results including 2-dimensional ferromagnetic semiconductors, 1-dimensional spin polarized channels and a demonstration of Kondo physics and Hund’s rule for 0-dimensional „artificial atoms“.