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Dec 28, 2021

Introducing the light-operated hard drives of tomorrow

Posted by in categories: computing, solar power, sustainability

Circa 2020


What do you get when you place a thin film of perovskite material used in solar cells on top of a magnetic substrate? More efficient hard drive technology. EPFL physicist László Forró and his team pave the way for the future of data storage.

“The key was to get the technology to work at room temperature,” explains László Forró, EPFL physicist. “We had already known that it was possible to rewrite magnetic spin using light, but you’d have to cool the apparatus to—180 degrees Kelvin.”

Forró, along with his colleagues Bálint Náfrádi and Endre Horváth, succeeded at tuning one ferromagnet at room temperature with , a proof of concept that establishes the foundations of a new generation of hard drives that will be physically smaller, faster, and cheaper, requiring less energy compared to today’s commercial hard drives. The results are published in PNAS.

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