What is the spin of an electron?
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It’s sort of like angular momentum, but associated with particles, and isn’t tied to anything actually rotating. It’s just an intrinsic property of those particles, and it classifies their behaviour (fermions with half-integer spin, bosons for full integer). It also determines where how the electron’s magnetic field is oriented (it’s the same axis).
It’s fully described mathematically and we know what it does, but I’m not actually sure if there’s even a currently accepted model of what is it’s source. Maybe if there’s a professional physycist on this reddit, they can say.
The spin indirectly tells you how the electron interact with the magnetic field, and that’s how we measure spin anyway.
Abstractly, spin of a electron is a quantity that belong to the electron itself considered as an independent system. If “we” (the observer) stay in the electron’s rest frame and rotate, spin changes in such a way that the result is only dependent on 2 things: the orientation we look at the electron at the end, and whether we get there by doing short or long rotations.
There isn’t really an ELI5 explanation of what it actually is or where it comes from. Telling you to imagine a ball that’s spinning except it’s not a ball and it’s not spinning won’t get you too far.
All I can say is that it’s a property that electrons have and it has a certain direction.
Magnetic fields are created by the flow of electric charge, right? Well, electrons have charge, and they’re moving, so they should have their own mini magnetic fields. The electron’s spin tells you how that magnetic field is aligned.
In most materials you have a fairly equal amount of electron spins in each direction, so they balance out and the material ends up having no overall magnetic properties.
In some materials like iron, there’s an overall direction that means it has some magnetic behaviour.
I can tell you that much, but I can’t really tell you what spin actually is or where it comes from.
Electron spin describes a property of an electron that roughly mimics the properties of spinning objects in our macroscopic world. However, this property of an electron is not actually caused by the electric spinning, we just call it spin for convenience.
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