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posted by mrpg on Saturday April 21 2018, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the magnetic-personality dept.

Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) together with colleagues from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA have found a way to write and delete magnets in an alloy using a laser beam - a surprising effect. The reversibility of the process opens up new possibilities in the fields of material processing, optical technology, and data storage.

Researchers of the HZDR, an independent German research laboratory, studied an alloy of iron and aluminum. It is interesting as a prototype material because subtle changes to its atomic arrangement can completely transform its magnetic behavior.

"The alloy possesses a highly ordered structure, with layers of iron atoms that are separated by aluminum atomic layers. When a laser beam destroys this order, the iron atoms are brought closer together and begin to behave like magnets," says HZDR physicist Rantej Bali.

Bali and his team prepared a thin film of the alloy on top of transparent magnesia through which a laser beam was shone on the film. When they, together with researchers of the HZB, directed a well-focused laser beam with a pulse of 100 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second) at the alloy, a ferromagnetic area was formed. Shooting laser pulses at the same area again - this time at reduced laser intensity - was then used to delete the magnet.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @06:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @06:34PM (#670130)

    There's really no technological barrier to secure deletion now, it's just that commercial products largely aren't designed with that as a primary design goal. This is why hoops have to be jumped through to ensure it is done, like multiple-pass overwriting on mechanical HDD's and so on. There's no reason really to believe that any future commercial offspring from this development would have different design goals, unless the market changes in the meanwhile to make it so. Any extra security properties that are inherent in the technology process may well be negated by implementation "features" etc.

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