Ultra-fast Laser-driven Magnetic RAM Is Coming Soon!

Scientists have discovered a new mechanism to change the magnetic state of solid materials by focusing a laser beam. This discovery is expected to be applied to ultra-high-speed computing memory in the future, the researchers said.
To describe the relationship between the amplitude and frequency of the optical magnetic field and the energy absorption properties of magnetic materials, the scientists have carefully constructed a new equation. The findings were published on January 3 in the journal Physical Review Research.
Although the discovery is rooted in the field of "magneto-optics," it represents an entirely new breakthrough, because scientists were previously unaware of how the magnetic component of rapidly oscillating light waves could control magnets.
In computer memory, miniature electromagnets are magnetized by a voltage, creating an "on" or "off" binary state that encodes data for the processor to read and reinterpret as a 1 or 0.
The most common form of computational memory, such as dynamic random access memory (DRAM) in laptops or cell phones, is unstable and loses data when the power is turned off, but is simple in design, made of common materials, has a low error rate and is easy to detect and repair.
The new discovery is reportedly a better fit with magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) technology, a type of non-volatile memory more commonly used in spacecraft as well as military and other industrial applications.
Little is known about the interactions between magnetic materials and radiation when they are in a state of non-equilibrium, an area that is intertwined with the strange laws of quantum mechanics, which is being used to build quantum computers.
"We've got a very basic equation to describe this interaction. This has prompted us to take a fresh look at optomagnetic recording and has led us toward making dense, energy-efficient and economical optomagnetic storage devices, even though such devices don't currently exist." Capua said.
Past attempts to use the magnetic component of light beams to flip magnetic drills in this way have not been significantly successful, according to Capua. However, he believes that the new equations will help researchers successfully integrate this mechanism.
He further predicts that in the distant future, this technology may allow MRAM components to be faster and more efficient than current state-of-the-art RAM cells.
The technology's optical cycle time (i.e., the time it takes for an optical electromagnetic wave to finish oscillating) could be a million times faster than conventional memory. Electrical cycle time runs on the nanosecond scale (1 second is 1 billion nanoseconds), while a typical light beam runs on the picosecond scale (1 second is 1 trillion picoseconds).
There is also the potential for future applications of this technology to quantum memory in quantum computers, where a beam of light could fix a magnetic bit in a state that is neither 0 nor 1, but a superposition of the two states, just like a quantum bit in a quantum computer. While this is still a distant goal in current precision engineering, Capua believes that his team's discovery could pave the way for future applications of this technology.
The technology could also lead to better control over the intensity and duration of the beam and its effect on the storage system, leading to energy savings in digital storage systems. "By adjusting the duration and energy of the light beam, the write power can be reduced. Obviously, when the device is idle, since magnetic memory is non-volatile, it does not consume any energy."