Magnetic Storage Using Quantum Vortex Cores

brian0918 writes, "Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a new, easy way to manipulate the state of tiny magnetic structures, called vortex cores, quickly and without loss. From their press release: 'Up until now, very strong magnetic fields have been necessary to accomplish this, requiring highly complex technology. The new method might open up new possibilities for magnetic data storage. The directions of the small nanoscopic magnetic needles define a digital bit that is extremely stable in the face of frequently unavoidable external factors such as heat or interference from magnetic fields.'" You can read the first paragraph of the paper at Nature; subscribers can read it all.

So what?

[Warin (200873)]

For the non engineers like me... what does this mean in practical usage?

Does it allow smaller particles to store a 0/1 charge, meaning much higher densities for hard drives? Is it cheaper to manufacture? More durable?

Being a notebook user, I'd love to see densities go way up so I can pack a lot more around with me.

Re:So what?

[starwed (735423)]

"Does it allow smaller particles to store a 0/1 charge, meaning much higher densities for hard drives?" I think thats the main idea. I haven't read this paper, but I've seen talks about related research where the goal was to increase data density.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

"Does it allow smaller particles to store a 0/1 charge, meaning much higher densities for hard drives?"I think thats the main idea. I haven't read this paper, but I've seen talks about related research where the goal was to increase data density.

You must be old here.

Re:So what?

[PieSquared (867490)]

I'm not sure how close together they can have these vortex and keep them stable, but each individual one was something like 80 atoms across. So yea, I'd guess that the goal would be much greater storage density. As for getting it to a usable read-write speed and maintaining reliability over a few hundred gigs... well I guess that remains to be seen.

Re:So what?

[Plutonite (999141)]

For the non engineers like me... what does this mean in practical usage?

Ummm...PORN!

Really, the questions people ask. Sheesh.

Re:So what?

[nomadic (141991)]

Who cares about how it works? Just listen to the name, man, Quantum Vortex Cores?? That's so freaking cool.

Re:So what?

[arhines (620963)]

The paper cites 10nm radius for the cores, which at optimal packing (ie, one core per 20nm square) yields 3.12500 * 10^14 Bytes / m^2. The latest in perpendicular recording gives an areal density of 277.1 Mb/mm^2, which is just 3.46375 * 10^13 Bytes / m^2, an order of magnitude less! Granted, packing is probably not optimal -- the cores probably need to be spaced by at least a multiple of their diameter. But then again, the cores can probably be shrunk, so at the very least this represents a modest improvement over current storage density. At best, it represents at least an order of magnitude improvement (read: 7.5 TB desktop drives).

PS: Slashdot -- please add support for mathml or latex code inserts :)

But doesn't it also mean

[geekoid (135745)]

instant on?

Finally!

[pdbaby (609052)]

Finally, we're moving towards the star-trek age of technology. "Captain, the SAN is down" doesn't sound anywhere near as impressive as "Captain, the Quantum Vortex Core has crashed!"

Re:

[Himring (646324)]

Captain Picard: Mr. Data, is it possible to route the plasma conduits through the quantum vortex cores?
Mr. Data: It could be done, but there is a risk of core breach if the gravitons grow out of alignment.
Scotty: Bloody hell. Since when diya ask a piece o'machinery about the bleeding engine?
Bones: I hate you all....

Re:

[nine-times (778537)]

And when the Quantum Vortex Core is failing what do you do? Reroute something to the deflector array? Where's CleverNickName when you need him?

Re:

[rucs_hack (784150)]

the simplest way to see if it's going to fail in a dangerous/explosive fashion is to stick a guy in a red shirt next to it then

Re:Finally!

[alexhard (778254)]

Finally, we're moving towards the star-trek age of technology. "Captain, the SAN is down" doesn't sound anywhere near as impressive as "Captain, the Quantum Vortex Core has crashed!"

Quantum Vortex Cores don't just "crash" dude...the least we can expect is a mildly spectacular explosion!

Re:

[Schraegstrichpunkt (931443)]

You forgot the favourite describes-every-problem word of post-DS9 Star Trek:

The quantum vortex core containment field is fluctuating.

Re:Finally!

[powerlord (28156)]

Finally, we're moving towards the star-trek age of technology. "Captain, the SAN is down" doesn't sound anywhere near as impressive as "Captain, the Quantum Vortex Core has crashed!"

Quantum Vortex Cores don't just "crash" dude...the least we can expect is a mildly spectacular explosion!

And they have to be "Jettison"-able.

Engineer: "Sir! The Quantum Vortex Cores are becoming unstable! Explosion is imminent!"
Manager: "Quick! Jettison the core into the Marketing department!"

Re:

[Chris Burke (6130)]

Only if we can avoid our tendency towards acronyms (something the advanced society of Star Trek has moved beyond).

I can't imagine getting very excited over anything whose acronym is QVC.

Translation

[gt_mattex (1016103)]

Magnetic Storage Using Magic

There now everyone can understand.

Re:

[kabocox (199019)]

Magnetic Storage Using Magic
There now everyone can understand.

Isn't that how all tech. that you don't understand works?

Re:Translation

[Warg! The Orcs!! (957405)]

I asked a girl to show me her curved manifolds and got a slap! I daren't ask about her quantum vortex.

Thumbs up for coolest tech name ever!

[StefanJ (88986)]

Quantum . . . Vortex . . . Cores

I mean, dang, that name rocks!

I can only hope that drives using this technology have Sub-Ether interfaces and processor boards hosting neural nets harvested from the brains of silicon life forms from Mercury.

Re:

[kalidasa (577403)]

You realize that they're just going to call them QVC's, right? And for the first two years, everyone will assume you're talking about the TV shopping network?

First paragraph

[nizo (81281)]

You can read the first paragraph of the paper at Nature; subscribers can read it all.

Can anyone, umm, translate that paragraph into everyday english? I don't think we went over how gyrations of the vortex structure can be reversed by applying short bursts of the sinusoidal excitation field with amplitude of about 1.5 mT in high school physics.....

Re:First paragraph

[PieSquared (867490)]

gyrations of the vortex structure can be reversed by applying short bursts of the sinusoidal excitation field with amplitude of about 1.5 mT

We can turn the really small cones upside down by shooting it with 1.5 mili Tesla magnetic fields. Before we needed 500 times as much energy. I think that covers it.

Re:First paragraph

[ebyrob (165903)]

Ya, the big breakthrough appears to be that hitting the core with a very fast perpendicular field flips the needle about 300 times easier than hitting it with a very slow parallel field.

Guess these little "needles" are much easier to spin than to force through the substrate... Of course, I'm not really sure I understand how the whole "anti-vortex" explanation fits with the notion of spinning the assembly. That could be down to fitting the explanation into existing models in a strange way, or it could just be I don't understand it. (Knowing a couple physicists, and looking at the graphics, I'm guessing the original models might not account for perpendicular fields...)

Like rocking the boat

[maddogsparky (202296)]

If you want to tip over a boat, start rocking back and forth, adding energy with each back and forth motion. I know what keeps the boat in the up or down state; what keeps the votex from from staying somewhere inbetween? Do you have to un-rock then engergy from it too?

damn you...

[MyNymWasTaken (879908)]

Rock the boat!
Don't rock the boat, baby...
Rock the boat!
Don't tip the boat over...
Rock the boat!
Don't rock the boat, baby...
Rock the boooooaaaat!

Re:

[vertinox (846076)]

Can anyone, umm, translate that paragraph into everyday english?

Maybe you need to reverse the polarity [penny-arcade.com] on your web browser?

Really?

[User 956 (568564)]

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a new, easy way to manipulate the state of tiny magnetic structures, called vortex cores, quickly and without loss.

I hear that all they had to do was reverse the tachyon flow through the heisenberg compensators.

WARNING WRNING, technical flaws

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

If you've done any bathtub science, you'll know that the vortex spins the other way in the Southern Hemisphere. If you cross the equator, all the bits flip from one to zero and zero to one.

This will severly damage your pron collection because it will flip the picture around, so instead of seeing a nice full-frontal, you'll only see a butt & back.

All your music will run backwards and, if the Christian groups are right, will just turn into a whole lot of satanic chanting.

One place it will help though is c

No need!

[ScentCone (795499)]

You can read the first paragraph of the paper at Nature

Nah. You had me at "quantum vortex cores."

let me guess

[Kuciwalker (891651)]

This article was accepted just because it lets kdawson put "Quantum Vortex Cores" on the front page.

Why do i get the sinking feeling

[eclectro (227083)]

that this either (or all) requires a tank of liquid helium, a roomful of sophisticated atomic scanning microscopes, or a highly radioactive source???

Re:

[ebyrob (165903)]

Actually... I think they just rotated a field ninety degrees and tweaked out the pulse duration.

The best solutions are often the simple ones.

Re:Why do i get the sinking feeling

[multiplexo (27356)]

that this either (or all) requires a tank of liquid helium, a roomful of sophisticated atomic scanning microscopes, or a highly radioactive source???

Fuck! Are you kidding? I want all three, radioactive materials glowing Cerenkov blue in a tank of liquid helium and the atomic scanning microscopes. That would be way cooler to look at than my SAN RAIDs are, all I've got on those is a bunch of blinky LEDs, booooooooorring. Imagine how much cooler it would be to have to say "I have to replace the radioactive source in the quantum vortex core storage" instead of merely saying "Hmmmm, got a bad drive on the RAID".

Get Perpendicular!

[rackrent (160690)]

I'm totally down with it!

Get Perpendicular! [hitachigst.com]

Fad...

[GWBasic (900357)]

I knew this silicon thing was such a fad!

Now, the cool thing about magnetic core memory is that it saves its state, just like Flash. When the Computer History Museam [computerhistory.org] restored a PDP-1 [computerhistory.org], they were able to inspect the old contents of its RAM.

Re:

[GuyWithLag (621929)]

Quick, go read A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge!

Never thought I'd see this.

[FedeLebron (977157)]

So they finally did it. Quantum Buzzwords.

May God help us all.

Re:

[nosredna (672587)]

At least with quantum buzzwords, it's ok that nobody knows what they indicate.

Wake me when I can buy one

[justinlindh (1016121)]

Seriously, how often do I hear about supposed amazing advancements in data storage and never see anything flesh out? They all promise applicability in a distant timeframe, but how many of these technologies (holographic or otherwise) have come to usable fruition?

If 10% of the hype revolving around storage in the last 5 years materialized, I'd be storing a terrabyte on a sheet of paper spit out by a magical unicorn's ass by now.

Re:Wake me when I can buy one

[theaikidoman (929353)]

average user can't afford it yes but it does not mean it is not useable. turner networks has been using holographic storage for their media for quite some time now. http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/turnerona ir.html [inphase-technologies.com]

Re:

[kwerle (39371)]

No kidding! I mean, it's been nearly 2 years since storage capacities have doubled. What the hell is taking them so long?

Re:

[justinlindh (1016121)]

My comment is more in reference to new storage technologies that are heralded as "the next big thing". We've reached the theorhetical storage capacity on the magnetic technologies, and have known the limits for a while. Sure, we've doubled magnetic storage drive capacities in the last few years, but can we go any further? What's REALLY next? It seems like I've read tens of press releases touting a breakthrough in a new form of data storage, but none ever materialize.

Quite simply, I just get impatient and mo

Re:

[kwerle (39371)]

Fair enough, but still...

It was paper (briefly), then tapes, then disks, then floppies and more disks and more tapes and more floppies for a long time.

Then suddenly it was CDs! Then you could burn them! Then back to floppies and disks and even tape.

Then they all got dirt cheap.

Now it's DVDs! And you can burn them!

But more interestingly, it is now NVRAM, and the NVRAM is getting to be very cheap.

So in the past half dozen years, we've seen consumer acceptance of CD burning, the death of the floppy, we're s

Re:

[Dr. Eggman (932300)]

And so what if they don't turn up? I see nothing wrong with being excited about the possibilities a new discovery presents. They help add easy to understand value to abstract research that may otherwise hard to understand for those who fund it. If you were a far removed executive looking at two research projects, one for low energy techniques for quantum vortex core inversion and the other for ultra high density magnetic storage, which one would you fund?

Plus, there's the sheer fun of imagining for those o

Don't hold your breath.

[Vellmont (569020)]

  the vortex core, which has been predicted in theory for forty years, but which experiments revealed only four years ago.

So scientists have been trying to detect it for 36 years, and only were able to do so 4 years ago? Something tells me that we won't be finding this in use for data storage anytime soon.

Anyone know how they can detect these vortex cores? It's great that they've found a "relatively" inexpensive way to reverse the core, but if you still need a magnetic force atomic microscope to "read" the thing, I don't see much practical use to it.

Re:

[MyNymWasTaken (879908)]

... only if you're using a computer at an institution that paid for a site license.

The rest of us can either pay $30 for the single article, or $200 for a one year subscription.

Re:

[Mister Whirly (964219)]

I could get it all, but I am at a university which may have paid for a subscription, but I seriuosly doubt it.

Re:Full-Text

[dakrin9 (891909)]

The continuous downscaling in microfabrication technology has enabled the creation of magnetic microstructures and nanostructures with defined sizes and shapes. These structures are currently not only implemented in applications such as data storage and non-volatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM), but also form an interesting playground for the fundamental studies of magnetism on a microscopic level.

In thin film structures, in which the magnetostatic interactions usually force the magnetization to lie parallel to the film plane, typical magnetic configurations occur with domain structures that close the magnetic flux. Square patterns have in this case a typical Landau structure with four triangular domains separated by 90 domain walls. The magnetic vortex is located at the centre of this domain structure, where the four domains meet one another. The curling magnetization cannot stay in the plane at the very centre of the vortex structure because the short-range exchange interaction favours a parallel alignment of neighbouring magnetic moments. The magnetization turns perpendicular to the plane in an area with a radius of about 10 nm, in this way forming the vortex core7. The direction of the out-of-plane component of the magnetization is defined as the polarization of the vortex core (up or down) and gives, together with the sense of the in-plane flux closure (clockwise or anticlockwise), the ground-state configuration as illustrated in Fig. 1a-c. A magnetic vortex can store two bits of information13: the sense of the in-plane flux closure can be used as an information carrier (Fig. 1a, b)14, 15, and the out-of-plane polarization of the magnetic vortex core can also be regarded as '0' or '1' of a bit element (Fig. 1a, c). However, to switch the vortex core polarization, magnetic fields of the order of 0.5 T (refs 16, 17) are needed.
Figure 1: Three-dimensional and two-dimensional representation of vortex and antivortex structures.
Figure 1 : Three-dimensional and two-dimensional representation of vortex and antivortex structures. Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact [e-mail]

Vortex (a, b and c) and antivortex (d) structures are illustrated. In both cases the magnetization turns out of the plane at the centre of the structure--either up (a, b, d) or down (c)--corresponding to the vortex core polarization p. In addition, vortex structures are characterized by an in-plane flux closure, which can be clockwise (b) or anticlockwise (a, c). A three-dimensional representation is on the left of each panel; a two-dimensional scheme is on the right. The arrows in the two-dimensional schemes represent the in-plane magnetization components; while the coloured dots represent the out-of-plane component (blue, up; red, down).
High resolution image and legend (298K)

Here we report on experimental studies towards an easy and reproducible switching of the vortex core polarization by low-field excitations. The dynamics in micrometre-sized and square ferromagnetic Permalloy elements with a Landau magnetic ground state were investigated. The structures were excited with an in-plane sinusoidal magnetic field resulting in a gyrotropic movement of the vortex core around the equilibrium position. As already verified in magneto-optical measurements, this in-plane gyrotropic mode is the lowest excitation mode in elements exhibiting a vortex structure (in the frequency range 100 MHz to 1 GHz (refs 18, 19)). A general theory on the dynamics of magnetic domain structures has been introduced previously8. The sense of gyration of a vortex structure is given by the gyrocoupling vector G = -2piqpUnfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact [e-mail], where q is the topological vorticity, p the vortex core polarization, and Unfortunately

Re:

[wass (72082)]

Coincidentally, the article after this one in this week's Nature is the report about superconducting doped silicon, also on slashdot's front page from a few days ago.