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Beyond the speed limit

Nature Materials volume 9, pages 959–960 (2010)Cite this article

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Comb-shaped nanostrips pave the way for a fourfold velocity increase in the propagation of magnetic domain walls.

Today the majority of the world's digital data are stored magnetically, owing to extraordinary data density at a low cost per bit. As access to each bit is mechanical, however, magnetic storage devices remain slow and power hungry. A variety of alternative, high-performance, solid-state storage technologies are currently being pursued, and it is not yet clear whether magnetic materials will maintain their dominance in the longer term. But magneticians still have a few tricks up their sleeves. One of these is to make the bits themselves mobile. In a long, submicrometre-wide, continuous track of magnetic material, data can be represented by a series of oppositely oriented magnetic domains that are separated by domain walls. Because magnetic domain walls can be moved simply by reorienting electron spins, data could be shifted along the track to fixed reading and writing elements without mechanical motion — a solid-state analogue of today's hard disk drives1. Beyond just storing information, entire domain wall logic architectures based on networks of magnetic tracks have been envisaged2. However, one of the biggest hurdles to competitive domain-wall-based technologies is their speed, as magnetic-field-driven domain walls tend to observe a 'speed limit'3. In this issue, Lewis and co-workers4 demonstrate how to exceed this speed limit in a most unexpected way.

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Figure 1: Snapshots of the numerically simulated motion of a magnetic domain wall in a 150-nm wide, 5-nm thick NiFe strip under an applied magnetic field.

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  1. Geoffrey Beach is in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. gbeach@mit.edu,

    Geoffrey Beach

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  1. Geoffrey Beach
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Beach, G. Beyond the speed limit. Nature Mater 9, 959–960 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2909

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