""The researchers found they could record information using only heat - a previously unimaginable scenario. They believe this discovery will not only make future magnetic recording devices faster, but more energy-efficient too.
The results of the research, which was led by the University of York's Department of Physics, are reported in the February edition of Nature Communications.""
Computer hard drives could suddenly become far faster, thanks to a new technology that uses heat to write information to the magnetic storage systems.
""York physicist Thomas Ostler said: "Instead of using a magnetic field to record information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces and recorded information using only heat. This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology. As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption."
The multinational team of scientists included researchers from Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. Experimental work was carried out at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.""
""Today's physicists are able to describe magnetic phenomena modeling a magnet as an ensemble of spins strongly coupled by the exchange interaction and in many cases such a model works sufficiently well. However, even nowadays quantum mechanical theory of magnetism is far from to be complete since it fails to describe magnetic phenomena if the latter evolve on a time-scale much faster than 100 ps. The main reason for it is the fact that the established theories of magnetism have been making the assumption that the exchange interaction is infinitely powerful and that after an excitation of the magnet the exchange interaction establishes equilibrium among the spins infinitely fast.""
The technique uses heat to write to the magnetic storage system, instead of magnetic fields. It's far faster and uses less energy
""The new theory leads to results that completely contradict the expectations of the established theory of magnetic phenomena. For example, because the coupling between the spins is no longer considered as infinite, different spins can evolve very different. Perhaps even more unexpected, an ultrafast excitation of a magnet will align the spins for a short period of time opposite to the alignment in the groundstate, thereby seemingly breaking the strong coupling between the spins. This has been observed recently for spins with antiparallel coupling and the new theory predicts that it is possible as well for parallel coupling using a different type of excitation. Hence, this work opens up a possibility to harness the hidden power of the exchange interaction for revolutionary new, counterintuitive approaches of recording and processing magnetically stored information at unprecedentedly fast time scales.""
""The researchers found they could record information using only heat -previously unimaginable.
York physicist Thomas Ostler said: 'Instead of using a magnetic field to record information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces and recorded information using only heat.'
The technology uses ultra-short heat pulses to change the magnetism of material in the drive, allowing for far faster drives.
'This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes - thousands of gigabytes - of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology.
As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption.'""
The technique uses ultra-short pulses of heat to write information to hard drives, rather than magnetic fields
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