Scientists achieve atomic scale manipulation of magnets

This will be helpful in attaining fast and energy-efficient future data processing technologies

Lancaster: An international team of scientists during recent research has been successful in manipulating magnets at the atomic level. This new discovery will be helpful in attaining fast and energy-efficient future data processing technologies. The results of this study are published in the prestigious journal Nature Materials by the international team from Lancaster, Delft, Nijmegen, Liege, and Kiev.

Physicist Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University said: “With stalling efficiency trends of current technology, new scientific approaches are especially valuable. Our discovery of the atomically-driven ultrafast control of magnetism opens broad avenues for fast and energy-efficient future data processing technologies essential to keep up with our data hunger.” Magnetic materials are heavily used in modern life with applications ranging from fridge magnets to Google and Amazon’s data centers used to store digital information.

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These materials host trillions of mutually aligned elementary magnetic moments or “spins”, whose alignment is largely governed by the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal lattice.

The spin can be seen as an elementary “needle of a compass”, typically depicted as an arrow showing the direction from North to South poles. In magnets, all spins are aligned along the same direction by the force called exchange interaction. The exchange interaction is one of the strongest quantum effects which is responsible for the very existence of magnetic materials.

The ever-growing demand for efficient magnetic data processing calls for novel means to manipulate the magnetic state and manipulating the exchange interaction would be the most efficient and ultimately fastest way to control magnetism.

To achieve this result, the researchers used the fastest and the strongest stimulus available: ultra-short laser pulse excitation. They used light to optically stimulate specific atomic vibrations of the magnet’s crystal lattice which extensively disturbed and distorted the structure of the material.