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Harvesting the Fruits of Inquiry How Materials Discoveries Improve Our Lives (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Spintronics
Pages 14-17

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From page 14...
... Oersted's seemingly simple discovery -- that electricity creates a magnetic field that will deflect a compass -- launched the study of electromagnetics and sowed the seeds for a scientific revolu tion. Over the next century, great ad vances were made in the understanding of how magnetism and electrical currents interact, from Faraday's discovery that a varying magnetic field induces a potential difference, to Lord Kelvin's finding that a magnetic field can change the electrical resistance of a material.
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From page 15...
... . Other scientists quickly saw the potential of the technology for creating read heads sensitive enough to read data stored on miniaturized hard drives: The tiny magnetic fields from each data-storing bit would slightly reorient the magnetizations in a GMR-based read head, creating a significant change in the electrical resistance that could convert the data into an electrical readout signal.
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From page 16...
... This produces even greater sensitivity to small magnetic fields than GMR and therefore these magnetic tunnel junctions can be used to build even more sensitive read heads. Spintronic read heads have allowed vast increases in the capacity of digital data storage over the past 15 years (see box)
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From page 17...
... Unlike flash memory, MRAM chips do not wear out over time. The first MRAM solid state drives went on sale in 2006, but work continues to develop higher-density MRAM based on a spintronic effect called spin transfer torque, in which the orientation in a magnetic layer is modified using spin-polarized current instead of magnetic fields.
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Key Terms

  • magnetic field
  • magnetic tunnel
  • magnetic fields
  • disk drives
  • hard drives

  • read heads
  • solid state
  • spin transfer
  • magnetic bits
  • electrical current

  • read head
  • disk drive
  • transfer torque
  • thin layers
  • tunnel junction

  • electrons spinning
  • readout heads
  • data storage
  • magnetic state
  • called magnetic

  • magnetic memory
  • using magnetic
  • tiny magnetic
  • chip magnetic
  • magnetic layers

  • magnetic layer
  • magnetic ram
  • magnetic material
  • varying magnetic
  • atoms magnetic


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