data storage tagged posts

The findings could lead to faster, more secure memory storage, in the form of antiferromagnetic bits. When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip.

But growing demand for data, and the means to store them, is driving scientists to search beyond...

Scientists have added a crucial tool to the atomic-scale manufacturing toolkit with major implications for today’s data driven—carbon intensive—world, according to new research from the University of Alberta in Canada.

“Computers today are contributing one gigatonne of carbon emissions to the atmosphere, and we can eliminate that by enhancing the most power-hungry parts of conventional computers with our atomic-scale circuitry,” said Robert Wolkow, professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Physics a Principal Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada’s Nanotechnology Research Centre, and chief technical officer of Quantum Silicon Inc, a...

The magnetic structure of a skyrmion is symmetrical around its core; arrows indicate the direction of spin. Credit: Ill./©: Benjamin Krüger

JGU and MIT joint teams have for the first time achieved targeted shifting of individual skyrmions at room temperature using electrical impulses. The idea is that electronic storage units (bits) will not be stored on rotating hard disks as is currently standard practice but on a nanowire in the form of magnetic vortex structures, ie skyrmions, using a process similar to that of a shift register. The magnetic skyrmion bits would be rapidly accessible, while storage density would be high and there would be improved energy efficiency.

Magnetic skyrmions are special spin configurations that can occur in materials especially in thin layer structures when ...

The first ever observations of polar vortices in a ferroelectic material could find potential applications in ultracompact data storage and processing and the production of new states of matter. Credit: Berkeley Lab

New state of matter holds promise for ultracompact data storage, processing. The observation in a ferroelectric material of “polar vortices” that appear to be the electrical cousins of magnetic skyrmions holds intriguing possibilities for advanced electronic devices. These polar vortices, which were theoretically predicted more than a decade ago, could also “rewrite our basic understanding of ferroelectrics”.

“It has long been thought that rotating topological structures are confined to magnetic systems and aren’t possible in ferroelectric materials, but through the creation of...