Surprising turns in magnetic thin films could lead to better data storage
A magnetic phenomenon newly discovered by MIT researchers could lead to much faster, denser and more energy-efficient chips for memory and computation.The findings, reported in the journal Nature Materials, could reduce the energy needed to store and retrieve one bit of data by a factor of 10,000, says the paper’s senior author, Geoffrey Beach, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at MIT. The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Satoru Emori and Uwe Bauer, postdoc Sung-Min Ahn, and Eduardo Martinez of the University of Salamanca in Spain.Beach says that hints of the new phenomenon have been reported for several years, but these had remained unexplained until now. The new results could overcome “a lot of what had seemed like fundamental limitations” in the control and use of magnetic materials, he says, adding: “It’s a whole new approach to the design of magnetic materials.”It turns out the key to this...