AFP:
A team of French physicists led by
Jean-Yves
Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in
Strasbourg say they have used a "femtosecond" laser, using
ultra-fast bursts of laser light, to alter electron spin and
thus speed up retrieval and storage.The technique could
increase the speed at which data is written and read from a
hard drive up to 100,000 times, they say in this week's
Nature Physics.The work builds upon
Albert
Fert and Peter Gruenberg's discovery that tiny changes in
magnetic fields can yield a large electric output. Their
research led to the creation of a new electronics field called
"spintronics" that relies on electron spin to store data;
however, sensors for reading that data until now were too slow
to be effective."Our method is called the photonics of spin,
because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the
state of the electrons' magnetisation" on the storage surface,
Bigot told AFP.
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Discoverers of Giant Magnetoresistance Win this Year's Physics Nobel (December 2007) Quantum Spin Hall Effect Shows up in a Quantum Well Insulator, Just as Predicted (January 2008) Magnetic Semiconductors Enable Efficient Electrical Spin Injection (April 2000) Related Link
Coherent ultrafast magnetism induced by femtosecond laser pulses
