PHYSICAL REVIEW FOCUS 4 May 2007 http://focus.aps.org/
David Ehrenstein, American Physical Society
Introductions to the Focus stories of the past week;
visit http://focus.aps.org for the complete stories.
MOVING WALLS WITH CURRENT
Imagine a hard drive that doesn't spin. In one scheme for increasing
computer data storage and speed, an electric current would push
magnetic regions along a wire instead of the computer relying on the
physical motion of a disk to read data. In the 4 May Physical Review
Letters, a team demonstrates that they could push so-called magnetic
domain walls at 110 meters per second--100 times faster than ever
before--by using nanosecond pulses of electric current. But the bad
news is that the walls sometimes move much slower--or not at all--as
they become stuck on imperfections in the wire.
(Guido Meier et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 187202)
Link to the paper: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v98/e187202
COMPLETE Focus story at http://focus.aps.org/story/v19/st14
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Copyright 2007, The American Physical Society.
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