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A working cell of the vortex magnetoresistive memory was obtained in the Thin Film Technologies Laboratory of the School of Natural Sciences of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU). The structure, built on the basis of magnetic nanodisks, has three stable states and can be used to develop computers that implement ternary logic. The FEFU scientists together with their international counterparts published the results of the research in the Scientific Reports journal, which is a member of the Nature Research Group.

According to Alexey Ognev, the Head of the Laboratory, the FEFU scientists have studied magnetic nanodisks for several years. These structures were interesting for physicists because of the magnetic vortices formed in them, which can be characterized by two parameters: chirality (depends on the direction of magnetization in the disk: clockwise or counterclockwise) and polarity (determines the direction of magnetization in the center of the vortex: up or down).

“Scientists have grappled with for a long time how to control these magnetic states, because, by managing them, one cell can encode up to four different values of information,” explained Maxim Stebliy, Research Fellow at the Laboratory. “We proposed a structure of two disks of different diameters, located asymmetrically. As it turned out, it is in such a disk-on-disk system that one can clearly control the chirality of the magnetic vortex in a large disk and the configuration of the magnetization in a small disk. It turned out that quasi-static magnetization reversal in a small disk generates only single-domain states, and in a dynamic mode, in magnetic fields or pulses of a sub-GHz frequency, a magnetic vortex is generated in a small disk. So in one cell we got three stable configurations of the vortices.”

According to Alexey Ognev, the prototypes of the cells of magnetoresistive memory with three stable states obtained in the FEFU laboratory are a direct way for the development of computers that operate the ternary logic (-1, 0 and 1). Compared to today's computing systems with binary logic (0 and 1), the introduction of new approaches will increase the energy efficiency and performance of computers without changing the resolution of the chip production process.

The following staff of the FEFU School of Natural Sciences took part in the work: Maxim Stebliy, Alexander Kolesnikov, Alexey Ognev, Alexander Samardak, Alexander Davydenko, Ekaterina Sukovatitsina, and Lyudmila Chebotkevich. In parallel with the Federal University, the study of the dynamic properties of the disk-on-disk structures was conducted at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States.