Researchers led by Professor Andrzej Maziewski from the Department of Physics at the University of Białystok (UwB) are among the winners of the competition organised by the M-ERA.NET 3 network. The physicists, together with partners from Spain and Turkey, will implement the project ‘Materials for Ultra-efficient Chiral SpinTronics’ (MUST). The main aim of the research is to search for new magnetic materials that could find applications in information technologies, reports UwB.

According to Prof Maziewski, the continuous development of the IT industry is placing new demands on the transmission, reading and writing of data. The most important parameters are the speed of information transfer and storage density. New objects that can meet these two criteria are spin spirals and skyrmions. These names conceal specific local spiral magnetisation configurations. Such objects, which are stable at room temperatures, can only occur in artificially created materials with specific properties.