Slashdot Summary
An international research team has for the first time imaged and controlled a type of magnetic flow called altermagnetism, which physicists say could be used to develop faster and more reliable electronic devices. Financial Times:
A groundbreaking experiment at a powerful X-ray microscope in Sweden provides direct proof of the existence of altermagnetism, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. Altermagnetic materials can sustain magnetic activity without themselves being magnetic.
The team from the UK’s Nottingham university that led the research said the discovery has revolutionary potential for the electronics industry. “Altermagnets have the potential to lead to a thousand-fold increase in the speed of microelectronic components and digital memory, while being more robust and energy-efficient,” said senior author Peter Wadley, Royal Society research fellow at Nottingham.
Hard disks and other components underpinning the modern computers industry process data in ferromagnetic materials, whose intrinsic magnetism limits their speed and packing density. Using altermagnetic materials will allow current to flow in non-magnetic products.
Archived at https://archive.ph/Fk7xv
Does this have anything to do with transistors and computation? Or are they only talking about harddrives? A huge increase in density would be cool, but I’m not really convinced they would get much faster because most of the slowness comes from physically moving a reader arm and lining it up with insane accuracy. It may be able to complete with an SSD for density, but speed is debatable.