Researchers have created novel 'spintronic' devices that could point the way for the next generation of more powerful and permanent data storage chips in computers.Physicist at the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Leeds have discovered a way to precisely control the pattern of magnetic fields in thin magnetic films, which can be used to store information.The discovery has important consequences for the IT industry, as current technology memory storage has limited scope for develop further.
The density with which information can be stored magnetically in permanent memory - hard drives - is reaching a natural limit correlation to the size of the magnetic particles used. The much faster silicon-chip based random access memory - RAM - in computers loses the information stored when the power is switched off.The key advance of the recent research has been in developing ways to use high energy beams of gallium ions to artificially control the direction of the magnetic field in regions of cobalt films just a few atoms thick.The direction of the field can be used to store information: in this case "up" or "down" correspond to the "1" or "0" that form the basis of binary information storage in computers.Further, the physicists have demonstrated that the direction of these magnetic areas can be "read" by measuring their electrical resistance. This can be done much faster than the system for reading information on current hard drives. They propose that the magnetic state can be switched from "up" to "down" with a short pulse of electrical current, thereby fulfilling all the requirements for a fast magnetic memory cell.........
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