A discovery from an experiment with magnets and lasers could be a boon to energy-efficient data storage.
Domains are areas within a magnet that flip from north to south poles. This property is used for data storage, for example in computer hard drives.
Jangid and his colleagues found that when a magnet is hit with a pulsed laser, the domain walls in the ferromagnetic layers move at a speed of approximately 66 km/s, which is about 100 times faster than the speed limit previously thought.
Domain walls moving at this speed could drastically affect the way data is stored and processed, offering a means of faster, more stable memory and reducing energy consumption in spintronic devices such as hard disk drives that use the spin of electrons within magnetic metallic multilayers to store, process or transmit information.
“No one thought it was possible to move these walls that fast because they should hit their limit,” said Jangid. “It sounds absolutely bananas, but it’s true.”
2024-01-16 22:41:02
Article from phys.org