Guest_Jim_* Posted June 19, 2015 Posted June 19, 2015 With electronics rapidly approaching the limit of traditional materials and transistors, many are looking for new ways to store and process data using physical phenomena. One contender is skyrmions, which are small islands of magnetism found in some materials, but the problem is making them is hard to do even in laboratories. Now researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new and simple way to make them at room temperature. Skyrmions were only discovered a few years ago and producing bubbles of them normally requires temperatures approaching 5 K and expensive tools like spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopes. Obviously this is a problem if they are to be put to any practical uses, which there is interest in, since researchers realized skyrmion bubbles tend not to unravel and could be moved using electric currents. The solution the Argonne researchers discovered is a constricted wire consisting of a thin layer of a magnetic material sandwiched between two conductive layers. Stripes of magnetic domains form in the material on one side, and when an electric current is applied this stripes stretch out and break at the constricted channel separating the two halves. On the other side then, the skyrmion bubbles are formed. The hope is that from this discovery it may be possible to create a memory system based on reading the presence of skyrmions. Such a device could be built very small and require less current than other memory systems, such as racetrack memory. Source: Argonne National Laboratory Back to original news post Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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