In a experiment led by the group of Dr. Denys Makarov in Dresden, researchers from Germany and Switzerland suggested a promising new approach to magnetoelectric RAM, in which the storage layer is made of antiferromagnets.
Antiferromagnets have internal magnetic order, but the direction of their microscopic moments alternates between neighboring atomic sites. The resulting zero net magnetic moment makes magnetism in antiferromagnets externally invisible. This implies that information stored in antiferromagnetic moments cannot be measured by common magnetic probes.
Using the Quantilever MX, images of the magnetic domains at the surface of the antiferromagnetic layer could be recorded. The high-resolution microscopy data proved essential to back up key assumptions on the magnetic state of the surface.
Publication
T. Kosub et al,, Purely antiferromagnetic magnetoelectric Random Access Memory, Nature Communication 8, 13985 (2017). (Open Access)
News article
New road towards a universal memory
