New material stores four magnetic states per cell – exponentially increasing memory storage
Every text message, photograph, and saved file still comes down to a simple bargain: information is stored as either 0 or 1. That binary system built modern computing, and for decades engineers kept improving it by shrinking the transistors that carry and store those bits. That long run is getting harder to sustain. As components approach physical limits, researchers are looking for other ways to handle information, including methods that do not rely only on electric charge. One of the most closely watched alternatives is spintronics, a field that uses another property of electrons, their magnetism, to store and process data. A new study from researchers at Institut Laue-Langevin pushes that idea in an unusual direction. Instead of building memory around two stable magnetic states, the work shows that a single crystal can hold four. In principle, that could let one memory unit represent four values rather than just 0 and 1, opening a path toward denser forms of digital storage. The material at the center of the work is a magnetoelectric crystal called LiNi0.8Fe0.2PO4, …
