{"id":245788,"date":"2026-10-22T05:36:41","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/ultrafast-light-can-control-ferromagnetism-without-relying-on-heating"},"modified":"2026-10-22T05:36:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:36:41","slug":"ultrafast-light-can-control-ferromagnetism-without-relying-on-heating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/ultrafast-light-can-control-ferromagnetism-without-relying-on-heating","title":{"rendered":"Ultrafast light can control ferromagnetism without relying on heating"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Despite being known for more mundane uses such as sticking notes to refrigerators or keeping bags shut, magnetization is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of a material. Indeed, it forms the physical basis for storing most of our digital information, encoding the bits used in hard drives, computer memories and credit cards.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-026-77965-4\" target=\"_blank\">a new study<\/a> published in the journal <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, Illinois researchers have found a noninvasive way to control magnetization on the order of trillionths of a second in the ferromagnetic semiconductor chromium germanium telluride (Cr\u2082Ge\u2082Te\u2086, or CGT). Their technique uses ultrafast laser pulses to steer CGT\u2019s magnetization around in time, taking advantage of an effect that couples its conduction electrons to its magnetic states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite being known for more mundane uses such as sticking notes to refrigerators or keeping bags shut, magnetization is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of a material. Indeed, it forms the physical basis for storing most of our digital information, encoding the bits used in hard drives, computer memories and credit cards. [\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-245788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245788","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=245788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}