Slashdot Mirror
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.
Finally, we're moving towards the star-trek age of technology. "Captain, the SAN is down" doesn't sound anywhere near as impressive as "Captain, the Quantum Vortex Core has crashed!"
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
Magnetic Storage Using Magic
There now everyone can understand.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
I'm not sure how close together they can have these vortex and keep them stable, but each individual one was something like 80 atoms across. So yea, I'd guess that the goal would be much greater storage density. As for getting it to a usable read-write speed and maintaining reliability over a few hundred gigs... well I guess that remains to be seen.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
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.
I hear that all they had to do was reverse the tachyon flow through the heisenberg compensators.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You can read the first paragraph of the paper at Nature
Nah. You had me at "quantum vortex cores."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
gyrations of the vortex structure can be reversed by applying short bursts of the sinusoidal excitation field with amplitude of about 1.5 mT
We can turn the really small cones upside down by shooting it with 1.5 mili Tesla magnetic fields. Before we needed 500 times as much energy. I think that covers it.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
This article was accepted just because it lets kdawson put "Quantum Vortex Cores" on the front page.
I'm totally down with it!
Get Perpendicular!
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
So they finally did it. Quantum Buzzwords.
May God help us all.
The continuous downscaling in microfabrication technology has enabled the creation of magnetic microstructures and nanostructures with defined sizes and shapes. These structures are currently not only implemented in applications such as data storage and non-volatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM), but also form an interesting playground for the fundamental studies of magnetism on a microscopic level.
In thin film structures, in which the magnetostatic interactions usually force the magnetization to lie parallel to the film plane, typical magnetic configurations occur with domain structures that close the magnetic flux. Square patterns have in this case a typical Landau structure with four triangular domains separated by 90 domain walls. The magnetic vortex is located at the centre of this domain structure, where the four domains meet one another. The curling magnetization cannot stay in the plane at the very centre of the vortex structure because the short-range exchange interaction favours a parallel alignment of neighbouring magnetic moments. The magnetization turns perpendicular to the plane in an area with a radius of about 10 nm, in this way forming the vortex core7. The direction of the out-of-plane component of the magnetization is defined as the polarization of the vortex core (up or down) and gives, together with the sense of the in-plane flux closure (clockwise or anticlockwise), the ground-state configuration as illustrated in Fig. 1a-c. A magnetic vortex can store two bits of information13: the sense of the in-plane flux closure can be used as an information carrier (Fig. 1a, b)14, 15, and the out-of-plane polarization of the magnetic vortex core can also be regarded as '0' or '1' of a bit element (Fig. 1a, c). However, to switch the vortex core polarization, magnetic fields of the order of 0.5 T (refs 16, 17) are needed.
Figure 1: Three-dimensional and two-dimensional representation of vortex and antivortex structures.
Figure 1 : Three-dimensional and two-dimensional representation of vortex and antivortex structures. Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg@nature.com
Vortex (a, b and c) and antivortex (d) structures are illustrated. In both cases the magnetization turns out of the plane at the centre of the structure--either up (a, b, d) or down (c)--corresponding to the vortex core polarization p. In addition, vortex structures are characterized by an in-plane flux closure, which can be clockwise (b) or anticlockwise (a, c). A three-dimensional representation is on the left of each panel; a two-dimensional scheme is on the right. The arrows in the two-dimensional schemes represent the in-plane magnetization components; while the coloured dots represent the out-of-plane component (blue, up; red, down).
High resolution image and legend (298K)
Here we report on experimental studies towards an easy and reproducible switching of the vortex core polarization by low-field excitations. The dynamics in micrometre-sized and square ferromagnetic Permalloy elements with a Landau magnetic ground state were investigated. The structures were excited with an in-plane sinusoidal magnetic field resulting in a gyrotropic movement of the vortex core around the equilibrium position. As already verified in magneto-optical measurements, this in-plane gyrotropic mode is the lowest excitation mode in elements exhibiting a vortex structure (in the frequency range 100 MHz to 1 GHz (refs 18, 19)). A general theory on the dynamics of magnetic domain structures has been introduced previously8. The sense of gyration of a vortex structure is given by the gyrocoupling vector G = -2piqpUnfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg@nature.com, where q is the topological vorticity, p the vortex core polarization, and Unfortunately
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.
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...)
that this either (or all) requires a tank of liquid helium, a roomful of sophisticated atomic scanning microscopes, or a highly radioactive source???
Fuck! Are you kidding? I want all three, radioactive materials glowing Cerenkov blue in a tank of liquid helium and the atomic scanning microscopes. That would be way cooler to look at than my SAN RAIDs are, all I've got on those is a bunch of blinky LEDs, booooooooorring. Imagine how much cooler it would be to have to say "I have to replace the radioactive source in the quantum vortex core storage" instead of merely saying "Hmmmm, got a bad drive on the RAID".
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
For the non engineers like me... what does this mean in practical usage?
Ummm...PORN!
Really, the questions people ask. Sheesh.
Who cares about how it works? Just listen to the name, man, Quantum Vortex Cores?? That's so freaking cool.
The paper cites 10nm radius for the cores, which at optimal packing (ie, one core per 20nm square) yields 3.12500 * 10^14 Bytes / m^2. The latest in perpendicular recording gives an areal density of 277.1 Mb/mm^2, which is just 3.46375 * 10^13 Bytes / m^2, an order of magnitude less! Granted, packing is probably not optimal -- the cores probably need to be spaced by at least a multiple of their diameter. But then again, the cores can probably be shrunk, so at the very least this represents a modest improvement over current storage density. At best, it represents at least an order of magnitude improvement (read: 7.5 TB desktop drives).
:)
PS: Slashdot -- please add support for mathml or latex code inserts