Tracking Down the Physical Limits of Data Storage
IFF-News December 16, 2009
Scientists from Jülich, Kaiserslautern and the USA publish new method for measuring ultrafast magnetic processes
The information technology of the future will be smaller, faster and more economical. The road to this development could be via light pulses, which write magnetic information bits just a few nanometres in size on a storage medium. According to theoretical calculations, such write processes could take place 1000 times faster than with present technology. However, experimental measurements on specific materials are extremely demanding. In the latest number of the high-impact science journal "Physical Review Letters", a team of German and American scientists present a method which could be implemented relatively simply in laboratories around the world by means of so-called femtosecond lasers. With their new method, scientists from the Jülich Institute of Solid State Research (IFF-9), the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder in the USA have achieved a time resolution of just 55 quadrillionths of a second (femtosecond or 10-15 seconds).
Original publication:
Ultrafast Demagnetization Dynamics at the M Edges of Magnetic Elements Observed Using a Tabletop High-Harmonic Soft X-Ray Source
C. La-O-Vorakiat, M. Siemens, M. M. Murnane, H. C. Kapteyn, S. Mathias, M. Aeschlimann, P. Grychtol, R. Adam, C. M. Schneider, J. M. Shaw, H. Nembach, T. J. Silva
Phys. Rev. Lett. Volume 103, Number 25, 257402 (2009)
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IFF-9
University of Kaiserslautern/OPTIMAS