A new type of memory surprises even its inventors.

Usually, fundamental discoveries in physics are ahead of their practical application. Nowadays, when serious science is in decline, the situation is often quite the opposite. So IBM engineers, having created, two and a half years ago, a worker, they said, a prototype of a new type of non-volatile memory Racetrack memory, ended up with surprising physical phenomena. As it turned out in practice, the process of influence on the magnetic spins of electrons in the information carrier has a "mass" and, therefore, is inertial.

The memory carrier Racetrack memory is the thinnest nanowire from permalloy - a material that is very sensitive to a magnetic field. By feeding a series of pulses to the wire, the developers learned how to move the magnetic domains through it. The latter were formed at the time of the magnetic head of the recording head on the magnetic spins of the electrons in the wire. Changing the direction of the magnetic field in the head reversed the orientation of the spins. As a result, so-called domain walls were formed at the border of the domains - areas with variable or unchanged polarity, already constituting the basis for reading “zero” or “one”, as it happens in the same hard disks or magnetic tape. Only memory Racetrack memory is free from mechanics. There are no physically moving parts in it. Domains are moved past the read and write sites in both directions with the help of polarization pulses - the top of wear resistance.
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The surprise was that the “movement” of the domains did not begin immediately after the impulse was given and also did not stop after the removal of the control voltage.

Domains "braked" with the start and likewise did not hurry to stop at the finish. All this presented a certain problem for the precise positioning of the domain zones above the read and write heads. Fortunately, the “acceleration” and “braking” compensated each other, which did not complicate the positioning accuracy. It was necessary only to determine in practice that magnitude of impulses of influence that would move the domain to a clearly defined distance.

As the researchers say, now the behavior of domains is precisely studied, which brings us closer to the era of "eternal" non-volatile memory with an impressive speed of the order of a few nanoseconds. This is how to release a hard disk with a plate rotation speed of 100 thousand rpm. or even more. True, before the practical implementation of a new type of media is still very long. All IBM's hopes of developing Racetrack memory, by the way, have long been linked with Taiwan. American science has not received adequate funding for a long time. What can we say about our ...

via F-Center