A group of researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, Switzerland) and ETH Zurich have investigated and confirmed the operation of an interesting phenomenon of magnetism at the atomic level. The atypical behavior of magnets at the level of nanometer clusters was predicted 60 years ago by the Soviet and American physicist Igor Ekhielevich Dzyaloshinskii. Researchers in Switzerland have been able to create such structures and are now predicting a bright future for them, not only as storage solutions, but also, very unusually, as a replacement for transistors in processors with nanoscale elements.
In our world, the compass needle always points north, which makes it possible to know the direction to the east and west. Opposite polarity magnets attract and unipolar magnets repel. In the microcosm of the scale of several atoms, under certain conditions, magnetic processes occur differently. In the case of short-range interaction of cobalt atoms, for example, the neighboring regions of magnetization near the north-oriented atoms are oriented to the west. If the orientation changes to south, then the atoms in the neighboring region will change the orientation of the magnetization towards the east. What is important, the control atoms and slave atoms are located in the same plane. Previously, a similar effect was observed only in vertically arranged atomic structures (one above the other). The location of control and controlled areas in the same plane opens the way to the design of computing and storage architectures.
The direction of magnetization of the control layer can be changed both by an electromagnetic field and by current. Using the same principles, transistors are controlled. It is only in the case of nanomagnets that the architecture can get an impetus to development both in terms of productivity, and in terms of saving consumption and reducing the area of ββββsolutions (reducing the scale of the technical process). In this case, coupled magnetization zones, controlled by switching the magnetization of the main zones, will work as gates.
The phenomenon of coupled magnetization was revealed in the special design of the array. To do this, a cobalt layer 1,6 nm thick was surrounded above and below by substrates: platinum below, and aluminum oxide above (not shown in the picture). Without this, the associated northwest and southeast magnetization did not occur. Also, the discovered phenomenon can lead to the emergence of synthetic antiferromagnets, this can also open the way to new technologies for data recording.
Source: 3dnews.ru