3 ms·
The article does a decent job eventually of explaining a use-case in the section "Confirming that altermagnets exist". Seems you can store information at high
by jasonthorsness 1y ago
The article does a decent job eventually of explaining a use-case in the section "Confirming that altermagnets exist".
Seems you can store information at high density in electron spin in materials where spins are naturally organized. However, so far the only suitable materials have been ferromagnets, which have macroscopic magnetic fields that make using them a nightmare. The new altermagnets have suitably organized spins but the atoms alternate their magnetic fields so there is no net magnetism from the material and they are easier to work with.
- physicsguy 1y agoI did my PhD in this area. It’s very difficult to “read” information stored when there is no net magnetism. Hard drives are built using a read head that detects the stray field from ferromagnetic materials. When there are particular topological textures like skyrmions you do get a spin hall effect which is quantised but in applying currents you also change the magnetisation through something called spin transfer torque.
- vanderZwan 1y agoSo any read operation would likely have to be a read-write operation in practice, essentially?
- physicsguy 1y agoNot quite, since there are much more involved ways to read it like imaging with a TEM, but certainly not 'fit in a hard drive sized container'