Hear Hear, Pingzhi Li ‘s first paper of his PhD project is out and it directly makes it to an editor’s pick. I am a very proud 2nd promotor, this paper was regarded as ‘a project on the side’ by the candidate, however by using the Dutch proverb ‘wie het kleine niet eert, is het grote niet weert…’ (one who does not appreciate the small things, isn’t worth the big things) we pushed this paper to new heights and insights delivering the proof-of-principle in a very convincing way.
The physics is rather straightforward; i.e. using constructive interference to boost the light absorption in a thin magnetic film, we show that the energy-efficiency of ultrafast all-optical-magnetization-switching of a bilayer of Co(1 nm)/Gd(3 nm) based synthetic-ferrimagnet can be increased by 80% which scales down to ~15 fJ for a 50×50 nm^2 bit, exactly what we need for futuristic green ICT! And exactly what applied physics is about.
This work is supported by the ITN program MagnEFi of the European Commission and the EHCI – Eindhoven Hendrik Casimir Institute, thanks to all the co-authors Youri van Hees, Mark Peeters and first promotor Bert Koopmans.