National University of Singapore:
"The spin of the current carrying electrons, which basically represents the data you want to write, experiences minimal resistance in ferrimagnets. Imagine the difference in efficiency when you drive your car on an eight lane highway compared to a narrow city lane. While a ferromagnet is like a city street for an electron's spin, a ferrimagnet is a welcoming freeway where its spin or the underlying information can survive for a very long distance," explained Mr Rahul Mishra, who was part of the research team and a current doctoral candidate with the group.
Using an electronic current, the NUS researchers were able to write information in a ferrimagnet memory element which was 10 times more stable and 20 times more efficient than a ferromagnet.
For this discovery, Associate Professor Yang's team took advantage of the unique atomic arrangement in a ferrimagnet. "In ferrimagnets, the neighbouring atomic magnets are opposite to each other. The disturbance caused by one atom to an incoming spin is compensated by the next one, and as a result information travels faster and further with less power. We hope that the computing and storage industry can take advantage of our invention to improve the performance and data retention capabilities of emerging spin memories," said Associate Professor Yang.
The ferrimagnets are promised to make spintronics more practical.
Long spin coherence length and bulk-like spin–orbit torque in ferrimagnetic multilayers (DOI: 10.1038/s41563-018-0236-9) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @06:18PM
"Invents" is such a big word. It's "discovers".
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @08:00PM
Will this improve spinning disks?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @08:11PM
This was a very impressive discovery, but unfortunately they stored the plans for it in the spin-based memory device and lost everything when they shut it off.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday December 07 2018, @08:15PM
The difference in efficiency of the entire system when a nontrivial amount of traffic has eight lanes instead of one? Possibly significant.
The difference in efficiency eight lanes make when it's just my car, like you're asking me to imagine? Slightly less efficient because of the occasional need to travel "laterally" slightly on a wider road, instead of mostly just "forward" when there's only one lane. (Introducing more cars makes my car less efficient, not more, because now I have to burn fuel waiting on traffic.)
This car analogy has left me underwhelmed. I hope the electron spin memory is better than just a car on a road of slightly different width.
(Score: 1) by Caballo Negro on Friday December 07 2018, @08:48PM
Back at the dawn — well, early morning, anyway — of computing time, (ferrite) core memory relied on ferrimagnetism. Don't think electron spin mobility was a consideration, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @02:46AM
But I'll still be using my trusty old shovel to break ground, thank you.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:11PM
>Using an electronic current
AKA an electric current?
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