News

Ursula Keller wins “Swiss Nobel” Marcel Benoist Prize- for pioneering work in ultrafast lasers
MUST2022 Conference- a great success!
New scientific highlights- by MUST PIs Wörner, Chergui, and Richardson
FELs of Europe prize for Jeremy Rouxel- “Development or innovative use of advanced instrumentation in the field of FELs”
Ruth Signorell wins Doron prizefor pioneering contributions to the field of fundamental aerosol science
New FAST-Fellow Uwe Thumm at ETH- lectures on Topics in Femto- and Attosecond Science
International Day of Women and Girls in Science- SSPh asked female scientists about their experiences
New scientific highlight- by MUST PIs Milne, Standfuss and Schertler
EU XFEL Young Scientist Award for Camila Bacellar,beamline scientist and group leader of the Alvra endstation at SwissFEL
Prizes for Giulia Mancini and Rebeca Gomez CastilloICO/IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics & Ernst Haber 2021
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to RESOLV Member Benjamin List- for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis
NCCR MUST at Scientifica 2021- Lightning, organic solar cells, and virtual molecules

Teresa Kubacka et al.: Observed live with x-ray laser: electricity controls magnetism

March 6, 2014

Large-Amplitude Spin Dynamics Driven by a THz Pulse in Resonance with an Electromagnon.

(From the PSI Public and Media press release)
Data on a hard drive is stored by flipping small magnetic domains. Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich, including MUST PIs Paul Beaud, Steve Johnson, Christoph Hauri and Urs Staub have now changed the magnetic arrangement in a material much faster than is possible with today’s hard drives. The researchers used a new technique where an electric field triggers these changes, in contrast to the magnetic fields commonly used in consumer devices. This method uses a new kind of material where the magnetic and electric properties are coupled.
Applied in future devices, this kind of strong interaction between magnetic and electric properties can have numerous advantages. For instance, an electrical field can be generated more easily in a device than a magnetic one. In the experiment, the changes in magnetic arrangement took place within a picosecond (a trillionth of a second) and could be observed with x-ray flashes at the American x-ray laser LCLS. The flashes are so short that you can virtually see how the magnetisation changes from one image to the next – similar to how we are able to capture the movement of an athlete with a normal camera in a series of images with a short exposure time.
In future, such experiments should also be possible at PSI’s new research facility, the x-ray laser SwissFEL. The results will be published in the journal Science. They appear online in advance of print in Science Express on 6 March.

Kubacka, T., Johnson, J.A., Hoffmann, M.C., Vicario, C., de Jong, S., Beaud, P., Grübel, S., Huang, S.W., Huber, L., Patthey, L., Chuang, Y.D., Turner, J.J., Dakovski, G.L., Lee, W.S., Minitti, M.P., Schlotter, W., Moore, R.G., Hauri, C.P., Koohpayeh, S.M., Scagnoli, V., Ingold, G., Johnson, S.L., and Staub, U. (2014) Large-Amplitude Spin Dynamics Driven by a THz Pulse in Resonance with an Electromagnon. Science, Science 343, 1333-1336 (10.1126/science.1242862) Kubacka-2014 (840 KB).



See reports in:

back <<
NCCR MUST Office : ETHZ IQE/ULP-HPT H3 | Auguste-Piccard-Hof 1 | 8093 Zurich | E-Mail
The National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) are a research instrument of the Swiss National Science Foundation