The tiny magnetic vortex structures of the skyrmion (named after the British theoretical physicist Tony Skyrme, who predicted this structure in the 60s of the last century) promise to become the basis of the magnetic memory of the future. These are topologically stable magnetic formations that can be excited in magnetic films and then read their state. In this case, writing and reading occur with the use of spin currents - with the help of the transfer of the moment of rotation of the spin of electrons. This means that writing and reading can be carried out with extremely low currents. Also, the support of the magnetic vortex does not require a constant supply of power, which leads to an economical non-volatile memory.
Over the past few years, scientists in and for closely study the behavior of skyrmions and reasonably believe that these structures will help to significantly increase the magnetic recording density. Moreover, recently British and American scientists how it is possible to increase the recording density by several times using skyrmions without special difficulties in the form of a decrease in the diameter of vortex structures, which can lead to the fastest translation of scientific thought into a commercial product.
Instead of the traditional binary notation, where 1 and 0 would be a skyrmion or no skyrmion, scientists from the University of Birmingham, Bristol and the University of Colorado at Boulder presented a combined vortex structure, which they called the "skyrmion bag" (skyrmion bag). Undoubtedly, a "bag" of skyrmions is better than a single skyrmion. The number of skyrmions in the bag can be anything, which allows you to assign more values ββto it than 0 or 1. This is a direct way to increase the recording density. To a certain extent, this is comparable to multi-level recording in a NAND flash cell. There is no need to remind once again how quickly the flash drive market began to expand after the start of mass production of NAND TLC memory with three bits written to each cell.
Scientists from England presented the creation of the βbag of skyrmionsβ structure in the form of an abstract model and reproduced the phenomenon in a simulator program. Their American colleagues reproduced the phenomenon in practice, although they used liquid crystals rather than magnetic structures to launch vortex structures. Liquid crystals are known to be controlled by a magnetic field, which allows them to be used for staged experiments to visualize magnetic phenomena. We are waiting for the transfer of experiments to magnetic films.
Source: 3dnews.ru