New Physics for Improved Magnetic Memory Devices

Professor: Dan Ralph

Project Description: Magnetic random access memory devices are beginning to come into widespread use for information-processing applications that require on-chip memories which are non-volatile (the information remains when the power is turned off) and that have high endurance (can be written and re-written many trillions of times).  Recently-discovered physics has the potential to make these magnetic devices even better by dramatically reducing the power needed for writing information and by giving bigger output signals for reading.  This project will involve making measurements of the efficiency of new materials for producing electrically-driven magnetic switching, and numerical modeling of the associated device performance.