There's an update on IEEE Spectrum on a recent update in skyrmion research where skyrmions have been produced at room temperature without an external magnetic field with additional commentary at Nanowerk News.
Skyrmions are small stable magnetic vortices, and can potentially be used to store information at a higher density than current magnetic media. However until now these patterns have only been produced with an external magnetic field and at very low temperatures (around 4K, or about -270°C).
The latest research removes those restrictions, however, producing a two-dimensional square lattice of skyrmions using a layer of iron on an iridium substrate. This also has some interesting properties which open the door to possible local data communication applications:
The skyrmion lattice is comparable to a compass array: a board carrying many magnetic needles that interact with each other like spins do. If you turn one needle, the other needles react by rotating to reestablish a lower energy level of the array. “This way you can transfer information from one magnetic molecule, through the skyrmion lattice, to the next one,” says Brede. “We saw this process of transferring information in this way for a distance of more than 10 nanometers; for magnetic interactions, this is a very long distance,” says Brede.
These magnetic interactions open the door for using the organic-ferromagnetic units in logic devices and information processing, says Brede. It is unlikely that these magnetic molecules could become qubits in quantum computers, but skyrmion lattices could still play a role in quantum computing.
More detail is at The Spintronics Group homepage from Germany's Christian Albrechts University. (No open access version of the paper though).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @06:26PM
That sounds like some right proper basic engineering research. Hope SN readership grows soon to have people with relevant expertise to explain/elaborate/comment on such topics.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday October 25 2014, @07:27PM
Wikipedia still calls skyrmions "hypothetical," so are these actual skyrmions, or some weird "virtual" thing like what scientists seem to keep coming up with these days, like those monopoles a few years ago?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday October 26 2014, @07:31PM
A reasonable question, but when it comes to technical advances I'd count Wikipedia as less reliable than El Reg. But more trustworthy than, say, the Weekly World News. (I still have a soft spot for them. Using a chambered nautilus picture as a Martian invader on the cover was a thing of beauty.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.