Spin ice structures could lead to clinical laboratory IT solutions with dense memory

More research with implications for clinical laboratory IT solutions has been outlined with the news that scientists at Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum are working on the potential to use spin ice materials for information storage.

Spin ice is a magnetic structure which resembles that of water ice - where a hydrogen atom sits at each of the four corners of a tetrahedron centred on an oxygen atom.

In spin ice, the hydrogen atoms are replaced with magnetic dipoles in a crystal lattice, but the structure is the same in principle due to its energy efficiency.

Professor Dr Hartmut Zabel of the academic institution is leading investigations into how a single node point in such a structure can take one of eight different states consisting of different dipole constellations - potentially leading to its use in circuitry, rather than existing binary data storage systems.

"It might look as if we're just playing around, but in fact this can have far-reaching consequences for magnetic logical circuits," he says.

The news follows the announcement that the University of Pittsburgh is to look into the possibility of using superconducting semiconductors to create quantum memory systems.