Will magnetic switching by light keep storage vendors spinning?
Circularly polarised lasers - the new magnetism Hard drive
storage is based on switching magnetic states by magnetism.
Switching by laser light could be much faster and could be used
on non-spinning media. Laser light switching of a magnetic
medium is described in a PhD thesis, Laser-Induced Femtosecond
Magnetic Recording, written by Dr Daniel Stanciu, currently a
researcher for Océ Technologies in The Netherlands. He and Dr
Fredrik Hansteen discovered how to use light to reverse magnetic
polarity in 2006. Stanciu developed the idea more as an intern
at Seagate's Pittsburgh research centre in 2007. The PhD thesis
was published last year and can be downloaded here (pdf). Front
cover of Stanciu's thesis. The background is that magnetic-
induced switching of a magnetic field becomes progressively
harder as the size of the magnetic field shrinks. We want to
reduce the size of the magnetic area so as to increase the
storage capacity of the medium, such