Our computers could enter a new era.

New 'spintronic' devices could lead to more powerful and permanent data storage chips for computers.

A mixed team from the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Leeds has found a way to precisely control the pattern of magnetic fields in thin magnetic films, which can store information. IT industry has seen itself limited till now by the limitations of the current technology memory storage.

The information amount which can be stored magnetically in permanent memory (hard drives) has reached a limit linked to the size of the magnetic particles employed.

And the much faster silicon-chip based random access memory (RAM) in computers loses the information when the power is cut. The recent research focused on using high energy beams of gallium ions to artificially control the direction of the magnetic field in regions of cobalt films just a few atoms thick.

The direction of the field is used to store information: "up" or "down" correspond to the "1" or "0" of the binary information storage in computers. The team showed that the direction of these magnetic areas can be "read" by assessing their electrical resistance: this is much faster than the information reading system on current hard drives. The magnetic state can be shifted from "up" to "down" with a short pulse of electrical current, functioning also as a fast magnetic memory cell.

The new technology could ensure that computers will never lose memory, not even during a power cut. "The results are important as they suggest a new route for developing high density magnetic memory chips which will not lose information when the power is switched off. For the first time data will be written and read very fast using only electrical currents", said Professor Simon Bending, of the University of Bath's Department of Physics.

"We're particularly pleased as we were told in the beginning that our approach probably would not work, but we persevered and now it has definitely paid off."

Another approach to get over the current problems of storing data permanently with rapid retrieval times is that of magnetic random access memory chips (MRAMs); but because they use stray magnetic fields generated by wires that carry a high electrical current to switch the data state from "up" to "down", their information storage amount is limited.

But the new technique would bring us magnetic memory chips with more information space and many times faster.