A new trick for illuminating the internal ordering within a special type of magnet could help engineers build better memory-storage devices. Developed by RIKEN physicists, this technique could make memory devices less corruptible.

The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Conventional hard disks are based on ferromagnets—materials in which the magnetic dipoles, or spins, associated with each atom all point in the same direction. This alignment gives the material a net magnetic field. Data is stored by creating different magnetization patterns across the material.