Spintronics breakthrough claim

AFP : A team of French physicists led by Jean-Yves Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in Strasbourg say they have used a “femtosecond” laser, using ultra-fast bursts of laser light, to alter electron spin and thus speed up retrieval and storage.The technique could increase the speed at which data is written and read from a hard drive up to 100,000 times, they say in this week’s Nature Physics.The work builds upon Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg’s discovery that tiny changes in magnetic fields can yield a large electric output. Their research led to the creation of a new electronics field called “spintronics” that relies on electron spin to store data; however, sensors for reading that data until now were too slow to be effective."Our method is called the photonics of spin, because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the state of the electrons’ magnetisation” on the storage surface, Bigot told AFP. Related Physics Today articles
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Coherent ultrafast magnetism induced by femtosecond laser pulses