What happens when you combine the uber-tenacity of star physics students with new nano engineering tools? You find the key to a century-old scientific challenge.
You might describe physics as a science discipline with a very high barrier to entry, drawing on tools like advanced math, bleeding edge computational modeling and emergent platforms like nano technology.
These highly complex considerations take the form of some very challenging questions. Take for example, the Barkhausen effect. Barkhausen offered science a seminal experiment in 1919 that provided the first evidence of magnetic domains - or the quilt-like patterns in the orientation of "magnetization" within magnetic materials. Barkhausen made the discovery by listening in on magnetic activity by wrapping a magnet with an electrical coil - connected to a speaker. The messages Barkhausen received were intermittent and idiosyncratic and impossible to translate until now. After almost 100 years of trying, a U of A science team has cracked the code.
"Barkhausen's findings were very important for advancing our understanding of magnetism and for eventually using magnetic materials in applications like data storage," says Dr. Mark Freeman, a University of Alberta physics professor and researcher at the National Institute for Nanotechnology, who led a new study, published in 'Science' this week. "But the intricate details have proven surprisingly difficult to measure. In fact, the vague picture we've been working from has come to more perfectly represent what we don't know."
The newly released study outlines the phenomenal research breakthrough that U of A graduate students Jacob Burgess and Alastair Fraser have made, while working with Freeman and building on key contributions from Drs. John Davis (physics) and Doug Vick (NINT), making it possible to finally harness the Barkhausen Effect with a new kind of high resolution microscopy of magnetic materials.
"I call this new tool a 'scanning vortex probe microscope' after the special magnetization pattern we used to make this discovery," explains Burgess who authored the theory and the model that has revealed Barkhausen's elusive secret.
The findings represent a game changer because magnetic thin films are critical in modern computing for storing the information in every hard disk device inside every computer - no exceptions. And with this discovery comes the potential to provide critical information for magnetic computation technology that can be designed to replace hard drives, making it possible to engineer data storage that is so secure, that even if your computer crashed you wouldn't lose your data.
The work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Discovery Grant and Discovery Accelerator Supplement), the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Nanoelectronics Program), the Canada Research Chairs program, the informatics Circle of Research Excellence, the National Institute for Nanotechnology, and Alberta Ingenuity and NSERC scholarships to Burgess.