{"id":223361,"date":"2025-10-14T03:32:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T08:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/stable-ferroaxial-states-offer-a-new-type-of-light-controlled-non-volatile-memory"},"modified":"2025-10-14T03:32:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T08:32:03","slug":"stable-ferroaxial-states-offer-a-new-type-of-light-controlled-non-volatile-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/stable-ferroaxial-states-offer-a-new-type-of-light-controlled-non-volatile-memory","title":{"rendered":"Stable ferroaxial states offer a new type of light-controlled non-volatile memory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/stable-ferroaxial-states-offer-a-new-type-of-light-controlled-non-volatile-memory2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets and ferroelectrics underpin modern data storage, yet face limits: They switch slowly, or suffer from unstable polarization due to depolarizing fields respectively. A new class, ferroaxials, avoids these issues by hosting vortices of dipoles with clockwise or anticlockwise textures, but are hard to control.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford now show that bi-stable ferroaxial states can be switched with single flashes of polarized terahertz light. This enables ultrafast, light-controlled and stable switching, a platform for next-generation non-volatile data storage. The work is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adz5230\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Science.<\/p>\n<p>Modern society relies on <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/digital+technologies\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">digital technologies<\/a>, where all information is fundamentally encoded in a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/binary+system\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">binary system<\/a> of 0s and 1s. Consequently, any physical system capable of reliably switching between two stable states can, in principle, serve as a medium for digital data storage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets and ferroelectrics underpin modern data storage, yet face limits: They switch slowly, or suffer from unstable polarization due to depolarizing fields respectively. A new class, ferroaxials, avoids these issues by hosting vortices of dipoles with clockwise or anticlockwise textures, but are hard to control. Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}