A strange magnetic quasiparticle that looks like a tiny spinning bubble may one day be used as computing bits in future storage devices, after scientists accelerate it enough to transmit data.
“Skyrim“—called “nanobubbles” informally by scientists—are composed of dozens of atoms and are only a few nanometers wide. By comparison, a beam human hair Thickness can reach 100,000 nanometers. As a skyrmion moves through a medium, it creates itself through magnetic field lines. Quasiparticles are made up of elementary nanomagnets called spins, which wind together on magnetic field lines to form rotating helical structures that resemble tight knots.
Scientists have long thought that skyrmions could potentially be used to store data – their presence would be coded as a 1, while their absence would be coded as a 0. Skymine was used in the prototype device of “Akiko”.track memory”. previous studies Also identify them as candidates for qubits or qubits quantum computer.
In a new study published in Science on April 19, scientists believe that skyrmions can be used to store information in a new type of “universal memory.” Such a component would combine the best of the standalone components in today’s computers: short-term memory, such as random-access memory (RAM), and flash memory, such as a solid-state drive (SSD) or hard drive.
RAM is fast, but takes up a lot of space, and requires constant power, which means data is erased when the computer is turned off. At the same time, flash memory is very dense and can save data without power supply, but its data transfer speed is much slower than RAM. They all use electrons as bits.
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In the new study, the researchers show that skyrmions could be used to replace electrons as a new type of bit that could remove these limitations.
“The advantage of magnetic skyrmions is that they combine non-volatility, i.e. permanent storage of information, without power consumption, fast operation and high density,” said lead study author Olivier Burrresearch scientists at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) told Live Science.
Scientists say that previously, skyrmions moved at just 100 meters per second (about 225 miles per hour), which was too slow to compete with state-of-the-art technology. But in their research, they accelerated the speed of skyrmions to 900 m/s (about 2,000 mph). Bull said this is “an important step forward for skyrmion-based devices.”
They accelerated the nanobubbles by passing an electric current through an antiferromagnetic material, and calculated the velocity by measuring the time it took for the quasiparticles to pass through the material using “extremely high spatial resolution magnetic microscopy.”
Permanent magnets arise from ferromagnetism, while antiferromagnetism is a type of magnetism in which neighboring ions behave as tiny magnets arranged in antiparallel arrangements throughout the material. The antiferromagnetic stack they used consists of two ferromagnetic layers (such as cobalt) separated by a thick nonmagnetic layer with opposite magnetization.
Bull added that simulations conducted as part of this study showed that skyrmions could not only store data but also perform calculations.For example, he said his team recently demonstrated that they can be used to perform logical operations – researchers are currently trying to use them for basic Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip.
If exploited in future research, skyrmions could form the basis of a component that combines central processing unit (CPU) functionality with general-purpose memory storage, Bull said. Such a component could potentially result in machines that are much faster than what we have today because data does not need to be transferred between the CPU and different memory components, thus avoiding processing speed bottlenecks.
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