Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Abstract：

State-of-the-art magnetic recording technology is amazing. 50 years ago hardly anyone believed that hard drives could ever perform so well. A modern recording medium (disc) spins with the speed of 7000 revolutions per minute, and 40 nm bits are written or read by a head which is just 5 nm above the disc. For instance, if one scales such a recording device by 1 million, so that the disc will be roughly of the size of the Netherlands and the head will be of the size of a Boeing 747, the Boeing would need to fly 5 mm above the ground with the speed just 10 time less than the speed of light, writing and reading bits with the size of a finger. Despite these breathtaking developments, magnetic recording technology is still not good enough. In the 21st century's digital economy the demands for denser, faster and more energy efficient data storage will keep growing even further, the flow of data these days is so intense that heat produced by modern data centers is already a serious limitation to further increase their performance.

In my talk, I will give an overview of work we are doing to show that optical pulses facilitate conceptually new approach to magnetic data storage, which outperforms existing alternatives in terms of the speed of the write-read event and the unprecedentedly low heat load. I will discuss possible mechanisms of magnetic recording with the help of the shortest ever man-made event - femtosecond laser pulse - as well as propose ways to record magnetic bits with a spatial resolution much smaller than the wavelength of light. In short, I would like to speculate how to make magnetic recording even more amazing than it already is.

Brief Biography：

A. V. Kimel graduated as electronic engineer from St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University, Russia in 1997 and received a PhD at the Ioffe Physical Technical University, Russia in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he then undertook postdoctor and became a full professor of  experimental condensed matter physics in 2017 at Radboud University, The Netherlands. Prof. A. V. Kimel is in an expert in the area of ultrafast spectroscopy of condensed matter with an emphasis on magnetism and ultrafast magnetization dynamics. He is actively involved in the development of novel approaches for ultrafast and energy efficient magnetic recording with light, manipulation, control and detection of spin waves and spin currents in the THz spectral range (THz magnonics and THzspintronics). He has given more than 100 invited and plenary presentations and published over 150 articles in general science journals such as Nature, Nature Photonics, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, and Physical Review Letters etc.

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