Physicists in Japan have come up with a new way to manipulate magnetisation, which could produce less energy-hungry memory for future computers.
Inside magnetic materials, tiny regions known as domains behave like individual magnets, and can have their north-south orientation flipped by a magnetic field.
Today's computer hard discs work by using electromagnets to flip clumps of domains back and forth between the two possible orientations to encode digital 1s and 0s. The most advanced forms of temporary memory – RAM – use a similar approach.
But Japanese researchers have proved it is possible to manipulate magnetic domains in a semiconductor without using magnets. They simply use an electric field, generated by applying voltage to a nearby electrode, to shift magnetic domains.
That suggests flipping magnetic memory could become simpler and more efficient than it is now, allowing more compact and faster memory. Instead of using current to power an electromagnet to flip domains – an inefficient process – the middleman can be cut out and domains flipped directly.
