Controlling Magnetism With An Electric Field
Thursday, February 27, 2014 - 19:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Coral Gables, Fla. (Feb. 17, 2014) -- There is a big effort in industry to produce electrical devices with more and faster memory and logic. Magnetic memory elements, such as in a hard drive, and in the future in what is called MRAM (magnetic random access memory), use electrical currents to encode information. However, the heat which is generated is a significant problem, since it limits the density of devices and hence the performance of computer chips. Scientists are now proposing a novel approach to achieve greater memory density while producing less heat: by using an electric field instead of a current to turn magnetism on and off, thereby encoding the electrical devices. read more