Researchers demonstrate solution for long-term challenge, bringing benefits to spintronics and data storage technologies

Phys.org   October 30, 2023 Transition-metal oxides (TMOs) with strong ferrimagnetism provide new platforms for tailoring the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) beyond conventional concepts based on ferromagnets, and particularly TMOs with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) are of prime importance for today’s spintronics. In this study researchers in Germany reported on transport phenomena and magnetic characteristics of the ferrimagnetic TMO NiCo2O4 (NCO) exhibiting PMA. The entire electrical and magnetic properties of NCO films were strongly correlated with their conductivities governed by the cation valence states. The AHE exhibited an unusual sign reversal resulting from a competition between intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms depending […]

DNA data storage within reach thanks to new PCR technique

Nanowerk  May 4, 2023 For DNA-based storage systems scalable parallel random access to information needs to be robustly established. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, USA – Microsoft, University of Washington, UK) has developed a thermoconfined polymerase chain reaction, which enabled multiplexed, repeated random access to compartmentalized DNA files. The strategy was based on localizing biotin-functionalized oligonucleotides inside thermoresponsive, semipermeable microcapsules. At low temperatures, microcapsules were permeable to enzymes, primers, and amplified products, whereas at high temperatures, membrane collapse prevented molecular crosstalk during amplification. Their data showed that the platform outperformed non-compartmentalized DNA storage compared with repeated random access […]

Storing information with spins: Creating new structured spin states with spatially structured polarized light

Phys.org  March 27, 2023 So far, only uniformly polarized light has been exploited to control electron spins. However, if the polarization has an additional spatial structure it can produce spatially structured electron spins, opening up new ways to store information. Researchers in Japan devised a method for generating spatially structured electron spins using a structured light with spatially varying polarization profile. They transferred spatially variant polarization of topologically structured light to the spatial spin texture in a semiconductor quantum well. The electron spin texture was directly excited by a vector vortex beam with a spatial helicity structure. The spin texture […]

How can digital data stored as DNA be manipulated?

Nanowerk  October 20, 2022 An international team of researchers (Japan, France) has pioneered the application of a new method that harnesses enzymes, offering initial clues as to how these technical obstacles may be overcome. They made use of the reactions of three enzymes to design chemical “neurons” that reproduce the network architecture and have the ability for complex calculations exhibited by true neurons. Their chemical neurons can execute calculations with data on DNA strands and express the results as fluorescent signals. They have also innovated by assembling two layers of the artificial neurons to refine calculations. Precision was further enhanced […]

Smart chip senses, stores, computes and secures data in one low-power platform

Nanowerk  July 30, 2022 Modern software cryptosystems require extensive computational infrastructure for implementing ciphering algorithms, making them difficult to be adopted by IoT edge sensors that operate with limited hardware resources and at low energy budgets. Researchers at the State University of Pennsylvania proposed and experimentally demonstrated an “all-in-one” 8 × 8 array of robust, low-power, and bio-inspired crypto engines monolithically integrated with IoT edge sensors based on 2D memtransistors. Each engine comprises five 2D memtransistors to accomplish sensing and encoding functionalities. They showed that the ciphered information is secure from an eavesdropper with finite resources and access to deep […]

Building up new data-storage memory

EurekAlert  June 11, 2022 Researchers in Japan have developed a proof-of-concept 3D stacked memory cell based on ferroelectric and antiferroelectric FETs with atomic-layer-deposited oxide semiconductor channel. The vertical device structure increases information density and reduces operation energy needs. Hafnium oxide and indium oxide layers were deposited in a vertical trench structure. By using antiferroelectric instead of ferroelectric, they found that only a tiny net charge was required to erase data, which leads to more efficient write operations. This work may allow for new even smaller and more eco-friendly data-storage memory. The team experimented with various thicknesses for the indium oxide […]

The future of data storage is double-helical, research indicates

Science Daily  March 3, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (University of Illinois, UMass Amherst, Stanford University) expanded molecular alphabet for DNA data storage comprising four natural and seven chemically modified nucleotides that are readily detected and distinguished using nanopore sequencers. They showed that Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A (MspA) nanopores can accurately discriminate 77 combinations and orderings of chemically diverse monomers within homo- and heterotetrameric sequences. The sequencing accuracy exceeded 60%. The extended molecular alphabet may potentially offer a nearly 2-fold increase in storage density and potentially the same order of reduction in the recording latency, thereby enabling […]

Magnetic ‘hedgehogs’ could store big data in a small space

Nanowerk  December 17, 2021 An international team of researchers (USA- Ohio State University, Mexico) used a magnetic microscope to visualize the patterns formed in thin films of manganese germanide. The magnetism in this material follows helices, like the structure of DNA which leads to numerous patterns. The images revealed that in certain parts of the sample, the magnetism at the surface was twisted into a pattern resembling the spikes of a hedgehog, about 50 nanometers in size. The hedgehog patterns could be shifted on the surface with electric currents or inverted with magnetic fields. This foreshadows the reading and writing […]

Ultrafast magnetism: Heating magnets, freezing time

Phys.org  October 18, 2021 Magnetic solids can be demagnetized quickly with a short laser pulse. However, the microscopic mechanisms of ultrafast demagnetization remain unclear. Researchers in Germany have developed a method to quantify the temperature-dependent electron–phonon scattering rate in gadolinium measuring independently the electron-phonon scattering rate for the 5d and the 4f electrons. They deduced the temperature dependence of scattering for the 5d electrons, while no effect on the phonon population is observed for the 4f electrons. The results suggest that the ultrafast magnetization dynamics in Gd is triggered by the spin-flip in the 5d electrons, found evidence of the […]

Storing data as mixtures of fluorescent dyes

Science Daily  October 13, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (Harvard University, Northwestern University) has shown that digital data can be stored in mixtures of fluorescent dye molecules, which are deposited on a surface by inkjet printing, where an amide bond tethers the dye molecules to the surface. A microscope equipped with a multichannel fluorescence detector distinguishes individual dyes in the mixture. The presence or absence of these molecules in the mixture encodes binary information (0 or 1). The use of mixtures of molecules, instead of sequence-defined macromolecules, minimizes the time and difficulty of synthesis and eliminates the […]