Science Daily April 18, 2019
When a magnet is hit with a short enough laser pulse the spins within a magnet will no longer point just up or down, but in all different directions canceling out the metal’s magnetic properties. Using mathematical modeling, numerical simulations and experiments an international team of researchers (USA – University of Colorado, NIST, SLAC, Temple University, UK, Sweden, U, Italy, Germany, China, Japan, Belgium) has shown that the spins behaved like a superfluid 3 picoseconds after a laser pulse hits and then form small clusters with the same orientation like “droplets” in which the spins all pointed up or down. Engineers already take advantage of that flipping behavior to store information on a computer hard drive in the form of bits of ones and zeros. If the flipping can be made happen more efficiently, it may be possible to build faster computers…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE