AsianScientist (Nov. 11, 2016) – Researchers in Korea have developed technology that allows non-magnetic materials to have magnetic properties or, in reverse, to remove magnetic properties from a magnet using an electric field. Details were published in Nature Physics.
Very small magnets exist inside of all materials. If the direction of these minuscule magnets are dis-aligned, pointing in multiple directions, it is non-magnetic. If the direction is aligned in a certain direction, the material holds magnetic properties, just like a regular magnet.
Although portable hard disk drives (HDDs) are currently the most widely used data storage devices, their technical applications are limited due to their slow data access speed, thanks to increases in storage to terabyte levels. Solid-state drives, on the other hand, leave tracks every time data is written, which can cause fatigue cumulative damage.
There have been many attempts to compose cells—the smallest data storage space on a storage device—with magnetic materials, as that would enable faster data access and remove fatigue cumulative damage. In this study, Professor Yang Chan-Ho and his research team from the Department of Physics at KAIST in South Korea adjusted the magnetic state of cells by using magnetoelectric interaction, a method that uses an electric field instead of a magnetic field to adjust the magnetic state.
Yang’s team demonstrated that cells facing random directions can be made to align in a certain direction in the presence of an electric field. Likewise, the alignment of the cells could also be reversed. According to the authors, such magnetic material-based data storage have potential applications in high-speed massive data transfer.
The article can be found at: Jang et al. (2016) Electric-Field-Induced Spin Disorder-to-Order Transition Near a Multiferroic Triple Phase Point.
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Source: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Photo: Pixabay.
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