Magnetic Storage Using Quantum Vortex Cores

brian0918 writes, "Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a new, easy way to manipulate the state of tiny magnetic structures, called vortex cores, quickly and without loss. From their press release: 'Up until now, very strong magnetic fields have been necessary to accomplish this, requiring highly complex technology. The new method might open up new possibilities for magnetic data storage. The directions of the small nanoscopic magnetic needles define a digital bit that is extremely stable in the face of frequently unavoidable external factors such as heat or interference from magnetic fields.'" You can read the first paragraph of the paper at Nature; subscribers can read it all.

Comments

Like rocking the boat

[maddogsparky]

If you want to tip over a boat, start rocking back and forth, adding energy with each back and forth motion. I know what keeps the boat in the up or down state; what keeps the votex from from staying somewhere inbetween? Do you have to un-rock then engergy from it too?

Fad...

[GWBasic]

I knew this silicon thing was such a fad!

Now, the cool thing about magnetic core memory is that it saves its state, just like Flash. When the Computer History Museam restored a PDP-1, they were able to inspect the old contents of its RAM.

Wake me when I can buy one

[justinlindh]

Seriously, how often do I hear about supposed amazing advancements in data storage and never see anything flesh out? They all promise applicability in a distant timeframe, but how many of these technologies (holographic or otherwise) have come to usable fruition?

If 10% of the hype revolving around storage in the last 5 years materialized, I'd be storing a terrabyte on a sheet of paper spit out by a magical unicorn's ass by now.

Re:Wake me when I can buy one

[kwerle]

Fair enough, but still...

It was paper (briefly), then tapes, then disks, then floppies and more disks and more tapes and more floppies for a long time.

Then suddenly it was CDs! Then you could burn them! Then back to floppies and disks and even tape.

Then they all got dirt cheap.

Now it's DVDs! And you can burn them!

But more interestingly, it is now NVRAM, and the NVRAM is getting to be very cheap.

So in the past half dozen years, we've seen consumer acceptance of CD burning, the death of the floppy, we're seeing the acceptance of burning DVDs, we've seen the birth of the jump drive, and already they are dirt cheap.

All these things were headlines in the 90's - that was just a looong time ago... None of todays healines will matter next year, but it means next decade will continue to get smaller and faster and even cheaper. So take a quick nap, rumplestilskin. Set your alarm for 2012, and we'll see if todays headlines hit the market in another half dozen years.

Re:First paragraph

[ebyrob]

Ya, the big breakthrough appears to be that hitting the core with a very fast perpendicular field flips the needle about 300 times easier than hitting it with a very slow parallel field.

Guess these little "needles" are much easier to spin than to force through the substrate... Of course, I'm not really sure I understand how the whole "anti-vortex" explanation fits with the notion of spinning the assembly. That could be down to fitting the explanation into existing models in a strange way, or it could just be I don't understand it. (Knowing a couple physicists, and looking at the graphics, I'm guessing the original models might not account for perpendicular fields...)