Controllable fast, tiny magnetic bits

For many modern technical applications, such as superconducting wires for magnetic resonance imaging, engineers want as much as possible to get rid of electrical resistance and its accompanying production of heat.

It turns out, however, that a bit of heat production from resistance is a desirable characteristic in metallic thin films for spintronic applications such as solid-state computer memory. Similarly, while defects are often undesirable in materials science, they can be used to control creation of magnetic quasi-particles known as skyrmions.

In separate papers published this month in the journals Nature Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, researchers in the group of MIT Professor Geoffrey S.D. Beach and colleagues in California, Germany, Switzerland, and Korea, showed that they can generate stable and fast moving skyrmions in specially formulated layered materials at room temperature, setting world records for size and speed. Each paper was featured on the cover of its respective journal.

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