Those geeks of a certain age may remember magnetic bubble memories, which stored data in tiny magnetic domains stored on thin magnetic films. Flash memory completely overwhelmed it, partly because of the much lower energy requirements (which translates into much higher density) of flash. Now scientists at MIT has made a surprising advance that might just bring back the bubbles: they've figured out how to reduce the energy required to form and move magnetic bubbles by a factor of at least 10,000.
This will likely have an impact in other areas as well, including magnetic disk storage (“hard disks”) and magnetic tape storage. It isn't clear to me that this discovery will also result in an areal density improvement, something the storage industry is always looking for...
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