With the ever-increasing amounts of digital information being processed, transferred and stored by computers comes a commensurate demand for increased data storage capacity. For magnetic data storage such as the ubiquitous hard disk drive, this requires not only physically smaller memory elements or bits, but also reduced switching power to avoid heat issues. Yoshinori Tokura and colleagues from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, in collaboration with a research team from the University of Tokyo, have now shown that structural control of small magnetic vortex structures called skyrmions could lead to a compact, low-power alternative to conventional magnetic data storage1.
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