14 DAY TRIAL // A group of chemists from the University of Aberdeen announce the discovery of a new material that could be used to usher forward the next generation of high-speed, extreme-storage hard drives. Their innovation has just received a grant for further study, so we can expect additional improvements soon.
The team was initially investigating a manganese oxyarsenide material for possible applications as a superconductor. When the researchers switched the manganese in the material with iron, they did not obtain superconductivity, but rather an effect called colossal magneto resistance.
Incidentally, this is the same effect on which current hard drives retrieve data that have been stored magnetically. However, at this point, the newly-synthesized material works only in high magnetic fields, under the actions of big magnets. The grant the team received from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will help them refine their material even further.
“New materials like this with new mechanisms of colossal magnetoresistance mean there’s a renewed interest in this field. Even if we can’t get it to work at high temperatures, the fundamental mechanism could maybe be applied to something else,” comments UA senior lecturer in chemistry, Dr, Abbie McLaughlin.