Saving data in vortex structures

A new phenomenon might make computing devices faster, smaller and much more energy-efficient. Moving so-called skyrmions needs 100,000 times smaller currents than existing technologies and the number of atoms needed for a data bit could be reduced significantly. Now a team of physicists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and the University of Cologne developed a simple electronic method for moving and reading these skyrmion data bits. The journal Nature Physics reports on their results.