News & Scientific Highlights

Magnetic domain walls can be reliably displaced by electrical currents, allowing for the fabrication of retentive magnetic memory elements without mechanically moving parts, such as e.g. the magnetic racetrack memory. Researchers in a joint collaboration between the PolLux endstation of the Swiss Light Source and the University of Leeds were able to investigate the dynamics of magnetic domain wall motion with a sub-ns time step, providing a substantial step forward towards the unraveling of the physical processes behind the current- and magnetic field-induced motion of magnetic domains.

The reliable electrical detection of magnetic skyrmions is of fundamental importance for the application of such topological magnetic quasi-particles for data storage devices. Researchers in a joint collaboration between the University of Leeds and the PolLux endstation have investigated the electrical detection of isolated magnetic skyrmions in applications-relevant nanostructured devices, observing the presence of a strong skyrmion-dependent contribution to the Hall resistivity.

The spot size of a Fresnel Zone Plate lens is mainly determined by the zone widths of its outermost zone. It is therefore essential to fabricate zone plates with structures as small as possible for high-resolution X-ray microscopy. Researchers at the Laboratory for Micro- and Nanotechnology at the PSI have now developed Fresnel zone plates with zone widths well below 10 nm, down to 6.4 nm. These lenses are capable of pushing resolution in X-ray microscopy to the single-digit regime.

In the week of March 18-23 PSI welcomes 20 PhD students and postdocs taking part in the HERCULES 2018 school on Neutron and Synchrotron Radiation. They will attend lectures and perform two days of practical courses at several beam lines of the Swiss Light Source.

Metal nanostructures can be fabricated by irradiation of suitable metal organic precursor molecules with a focused X-ray beam. This novel techniques offer the advantage of energy-selective deposition by switching of the incident photon energy due to the non-linear photon absorption cross-section of the precursor molecules for resonant excitation.

The use of spin-wave signals in future information processing devices can substantially reduce power consumption over present charge current based technologies. As part of an international research venture, scientists at PSI now introduced a concept to generate spin waves with nanoscale wavelengths exploiting the driven dynamics of magnetic vortex cores in magnetic heterostructures.