Information storage in permalloy modulated magnetic nanowires

A long piece of magnetic material shaped as a central cylindrical wire (diameter $$d=50$$ d = 50 nm) with two wider coaxial cylindrical portions (diameter $$D=90$$ D = 90 nm and thickness $$t=100$$ t = 100 nm) defines a bimodulated nanowire. Micromagnetism is invoked to study the equilibrium energy of the system under the variations of the positions of the modulations along the wire. The system can be thought of as composed of five independent elements (3 segments and 2 modulations) leading to $$2^5=32$$ 2 5 = 32 possible different magnetic configurations, which will be later simplified to 4. We investigate the stability of the configurations depending on the positions of the modulations. The relative chirality of the modulations has negligible contributions to the energy and they have no effect on the stability of the stored configuration. However, the modulations are extremely important in pinning the domain walls that lead to consider each segment as independent from the rest. A phase diagram reporting the stability of the inscribed magnetic configurations is produced. The stability of the system was then tested under the action of external magnetic fields and it was found that more than 50 mT are necessary to alter the inscribed information. The main purpose of this paper is to find whether a prototype like this can be complemented to be used as a magnetic key or to store information in the form of firmware. Present results indicate that both possibilities are feasible.

Directivity enhancement of a cylindrical wire antenna by a graded index dielectric shell designed using strictly conformal transformation optics

A transformation-optical method is presented to enhance the directivity of a cylindrical wire antenna by using an all-dielectric graded index medium. The strictly conformal mapping between two doubly connected virtual and physical domains is established numerically. Multiple directive beams are produced, providing directive emission. The state-of-the-art optical path rescaling method is employed to mitigate the superluminal regions. The resulting transformation medium is all-dielectric and nondispersive, which can provide broadband functionality and facilitate the realization of the device using available fabrication technologies. The realization of the device is demonstrated by dielectric perforation based on the effective medium theory. The device’s functionality is verified by carrying out both ray-tracing and full-wave simulations using finite-element-based software COMSOL Multiphysics.

Information storage in permalloy modulated magnetic nanowires

A long piece of magnetic material shaped as a central cylindrical wire (diameter d = 50 nm) with two wider coaxial cylindrical portions (diameter D = 90 nm and thickness t = 100 nm) defines a bimodulated nanowire. Micromagnetism is invoked to study the equilibrium energy of the system under the variations of the positions of the modulations along the wire. The system can be thought of as composed of 5 independent elements (3 segments and 2 modulations) leading to 25 = 32 different magnetic configurations. We investigate the stability of the configurations depending on the positions of the modulations. The relative chirality of the modulations has negligible contributions to the energy and they have no effect in the stability of the stored configuration. However, the modulations are extremely important in pinning the domain walls that lead to consider each segment as independent from the rest. A phase diagram reporting the stability of the inscribed magnetic configurations is produced. The stability of the system was then tested under the action of external magnetic fields and it is found that more than 50 mT are necessary to alter the inscribed information. The main purpose of this paper is to find weather a prototype like this can complemented to be used as firmware or magnetic keys. Present results indicate that this is feasible.