How’s this for Japanese innovation?

Researchers at the Nihon University in Japan and Radboud University in the Netherlands are the first to flip the value of magnetic memory by firing a polarized laser at it.  Unlike existing magneto-optical data storage systems, no external magnetic field was required to flip the bit, which meant the value could be change approximately 50,000 times faster than the fastest conventional memory.  Assuming everything pans out with the technology, this could result in low cost and ultra-high-speed optical magnetic hard drives.

Most of us store data on magnetic hard drives.  Data is read with a magneto-resistance element and written by heating the bit with a laser and then flipping the bits with a magnetic field pulse from a tiny coil.  If light alone could be used to both read and write off the magnetic substrate, then the cost and complexity of hard drives (and other similar devices) would be drastically reduced.

Some commercial hard drives have been developed to use light when reading from magnetic bits, but writing data with a similar method has remained elusive until just recently.  The researchers at these two universities have demonstrated that a single laser pulse can flip the magnetization of a 5 µm spot on a thin magnetic film without the need of an external magnetic field.

The pulse was only 40 fs (femto-seconds) which is insanely faster than the 2 nanosecon magnetic field pulses used in hard drives.  Just three years ago the thought of a 40 femtosecond switching time would have been tossed out as impossible due to the constraints in the physical world.

Using standard substrates found in existing magnetic media, the researchers did their experiements on gadolinium, iron and cobalt alloys.  The team is now testing other materials to see if data can be faster recorded on alloys with a higher cohesion factor, which is important if these drives are expected to have the same size and density as existing storage units.

For the moment, this technology is still a few years out, though.  Anyone wanting to build a hard drive using this method would first need overcome the challenge of how to build a tiny laser that can also produce an intense pulse of circularly-polarized light that can be focused down to a 50 nm diameter spot … which also happens to be smaller than the wavelength of the laser light.  But knowing the human spirit and our incredible ingenuity, this is just a simple engineering problem to overcome.

Besides … I’m sure Sony has something like this in their back room :P