this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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139
New magnetic flow has potential to revolutionise electronic devices (www.ft.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Slashdot Summary

An international research team has for the first time imaged and controlled a type of magnetic flow called altermagnetism, which physicists say could be used to develop faster and more reliable electronic devices. Financial Times:

A groundbreaking experiment at a powerful X-ray microscope in Sweden provides direct proof of the existence of altermagnetism, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. Altermagnetic materials can sustain magnetic activity without themselves being magnetic.

The team from the UK's Nottingham university that led the research said the discovery has revolutionary potential for the electronics industry. "Altermagnets have the potential to lead to a thousand-fold increase in the speed of microelectronic components and digital memory, while being more robust and energy-efficient," said senior author Peter Wadley, Royal Society research fellow at Nottingham.

Hard disks and other components underpinning the modern computers industry process data in ferromagnetic materials, whose intrinsic magnetism limits their speed and packing density. Using altermagnetic materials will allow current to flow in non-magnetic products.

Archived at https://archive.ph/Fk7xv

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does this have anything to do with transistors and computation? Or are they only talking about harddrives? A huge increase in density would be cool, but I'm not really convinced they would get much faster because most of the slowness comes from physically moving a reader arm and lining it up with insane accuracy. It may be able to complete with an SSD for density, but speed is debatable.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, knowing how science and tech journalists often have little idea what they are talking about and the description itself, I'm skeptical that this will be as revolutionary as it's being presented to be. I'd love to be wrong, though.

And it does sound like extra speed is possible. It sounded like the magnetic platters in hard drives are too magnetic, and spend some time compensating for undesired electromagnetic effects that occur while reading the platter. Which makes sense because it's spinning fast while another electromagnet tries to read it and electromagnetic fields moving relative to each other are known to react and interact. Part of that would be how it works at all, but there could be another part that counteracts that and maybe requires time to stabilize or multiple passes to give an accurate average.

Though this is pure speculation, I don't have much in depth knowledge of how magnetic drives work, other than it involving neat tricks like spinning, magnets, and probably some sort of sorcery or witchcraft.