Advances in IT technologies are hampered by the ever increasing demand for energy and by fundamental limits on miniaturization. Energy dissipation mostly going into heating up the environment is also a challenge. A new type of spin waves recently discovered by physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Lanzhou University in China may serve to overcome these obstacles.
Current technologies for information transfer and processing are challenged by fundamental physical limits. The more powerful they become, the more energy they need and more heat is released to the environment. Also, there are physical limits on the smallness and efficiency of communication devices. The recent discovery by physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Lanzhou University in China offers a new route for progress on these issues. In the latest edition of the scientific journal "Nature Communications", they describe a novel type of spin waves that can be used to transmit and process information with considerably higher efficiency and lower energy consumption.
Conventional IT applications are based on electric charge currents. "This results inevitably in energy losses heating up the environment" said MLU physicist Professor Jamal Berakdar. The researcher added that more energy is needed and also dissipated to operate more powerful and compact devices. Thus, it is very challenging to maintain the pace of advancement based on charge-current based technology. For their study, the teams led by Professor Berakdar and Professor Chenglong Jia of Lanzhou University examined therefore alternative concepts for data communication and processing.
Read more at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
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