"But there are two potential areas in which this has potential: memory and transformers."Indeed, future magnetic memory systems get heated up with lasers, which involves a lot of heat. But with the new material, "you barely need to heat it by 20 degrees Kelvin to get a fivefold change in coercivity," he said.This material could also be used in electrical networks, for example, a new type of transformer that could cope with sudden current spikes, such as during a power surge or a lightning strike. This would act as a self-healing switch a so-called "current fault limiter."
Physicist David Lederman of West Virginia University, who was not involved in the study, said that control of magnetic properties just by applying an electric field in the form of a voltage "is of great interest for data storage and magnetic sensor applications.""Normally, magnetic properties are controlled by magnetic fields, but application of magnetic fields in small volumes is difficult to do. However, application of an electric field to a small volume is relatively easy, and the response is also a lot faster," he said.A magnetic memory has two elements. One stores the information and consists of small magnetic bits, which can be reversed by the application of a magnetic field. This is the "writing" process. The state of these bits is then "read." The reader/writer is a "read head," which is sensitive to the state of the bit that is close by.
The very same read heads that are used for magnetic memories are also used to detect small magnetic signals for a variety of applications: rotating wheels, magnetic biomolecules, passenger automobiles, cell phones, GPS receivers, passes, and so on.And since Schuller's team has demonstrated that the metal-insulator transition temperature can in principle be modified by the application of an electric field, it then could be possible "to change the coercivity of the material just by applying an electric field."Such electrical control over magnetism has not been demonstrated yet, though — and it should be addressed in the future, for the research "to have significant technological impact," Lederman said.The research appears in a recent edition of a journal Applied Physics Letters.