IBM researchers create world's smallest magnet

An international team of researchers working at IBMs' San Jose research facility announced recently that they had created the world's smallest magnet—it was made from a single atom.

In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes their achievement as the ultimate limit in reducing the size of magnetic storage media using the classical approach—they report that they were able to use the tiny magnet to store a single bit of data.

To create their tiny magnet, the team used a scanning tunneling microscope to manipulate holmium atoms placed on a magnesium oxide plate (to keep the magnetic poles stable). Applying an electric current to the microscope's probe allowed for changing the magnetic orientation of the atom between two states, which, the team notes, could be used to represent on/off states for a single bit of data.

Read more at Phys.org

Image Credit: IBM

-jk-