A review published in ("Prospect for Antiferromagnetic Spintronics") compiles the approaches that have been employed for reading and storing information in antiferromagnets and answers the question about how to write on antiferromagnetics successfully. Dr Xavi Martí and Dr Ignasi Fina, together with Tomas Jungwirth from the Institute of Physics ASCR in Prague, are the authors of the review. 
Antiferromagnetic materials might become a more robust alternative to ferromagnetic materials which make possible today’s BITs of digital information. Dr Xavi Marti and Dr Ignasi Fina have released an article, together with Tomas Jungwirth from the Institute of Physics ASCR in Prague, where they review approaches that have been employed for reading, writing, and storing information in antiferromagnets. Ferromagnetic materials are made by very small compasses all pointing to the same direction. These can be manipulated by the application of an external magnetic field, which can define a preferential direction, for example “north-south” or “south-north”. These “north-south” or “south-north” aligned small compasses are the magnetic information unit, the BIT for credit cards, transport cards, hard disks, etc. In all these cases, if a sufficiently strong magnet is approached to any of these memories, its contents will be erased and it will be impossible to recover the stored information. Instead, and particularly appealing in terms of robustness, are the antiferromagnetic memories – still in a development stage. In antiferromagnetic materials, the small compasses (magnetic moments) point alternatively in antiparallel directions. This arrangement can hardly be manipulated by external magnetic fields thus delivering a significant shielded against electromagnetic perturbations. The key point to store information is that, unlike the “north” or “south” in ferromagnets, in antiferromagnetic materials the units of information are arranged either “north-south” or “east-west”. The key question is how to write such “north-south” or “east-west” bits if they cannot be easily manipulated by magnetic fields? The answer to this question is given in the recent short review paper mentioned above. In this work, a list of the strategies for writing antiferromagnets is given. Being the writing method a significant bottle-neck for transferring the research on antiferromagnetic memories to the industry, this work is of the interest for the antiferromagnetic spintronics community and a valuable guide for researching potential applications.
read more "The future for antiferromagnetic memories"
Antiferromagnetic materials might become a more robust alternative to ferromagnetic materials which make possible today’s BITs of digital information. Dr Xavi Marti and Dr Ignasi Fina have released an article, together with Tomas Jungwirth from the Institute of Physics ASCR in Prague, where they review approaches that have been employed for reading, writing, and storing information in antiferromagnets. Ferromagnetic materials are made by very small compasses all pointing to the same direction. These can be manipulated by the application of an external magnetic field, which can define a preferential direction, for example “north-south” or “south-north”. These “north-south” or “south-north” aligned small compasses are the magnetic information unit, the BIT for credit cards, transport cards, hard disks, etc. In all these cases, if a sufficiently strong magnet is approached to any of these memories, its contents will be erased and it will be impossible to recover the stored information. Instead, and particularly appealing in terms of robustness, are the antiferromagnetic memories – still in a development stage. In antiferromagnetic materials, the small compasses (magnetic moments) point alternatively in antiparallel directions. This arrangement can hardly be manipulated by external magnetic fields thus delivering a significant shielded against electromagnetic perturbations. The key point to store information is that, unlike the “north” or “south” in ferromagnets, in antiferromagnetic materials the units of information are arranged either “north-south” or “east-west”. The key question is how to write such “north-south” or “east-west” bits if they cannot be easily manipulated by magnetic fields? The answer to this question is given in the recent short review paper mentioned above. In this work, a list of the strategies for writing antiferromagnets is given. Being the writing method a significant bottle-neck for transferring the research on antiferromagnetic memories to the industry, this work is of the interest for the antiferromagnetic spintronics community and a valuable guide for researching potential applications.
The layered crystal structure of the organic conductor EtMe
A scanning electron micrograph of the new microfiber emitters, showing the arrays of rectangular columns etched into their sides. (Courtesy of the researchers) “We have demonstrated a systematic way to produce nanofibers through electrospinning that surpasses the state of the art,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, who led the new work. “But the way that it’s done opens a very interesting possibility. Our group and many other groups are working to push 3-D printing further, to make it possible to print components that transduce, that actuate, that exchange energy between different domains, like solar to electrical or mechanical. We have something that naturally fits into that picture. We have an array of emitters that can be thought of as a dot-matrix printer, where you would be able to individually control each emitter to print deposits of nanofibers.” Tangled tale Nanofibers are useful for any application that benefits from a high ratio of surface area to volume — solar cells, for instance, which try to maximize exposure to sunlight, or fuel cell electrodes, which catalyze reactions at their surfaces. Nanofibers can also yield materials that are permeable only at very small scales, like water filters, or that are remarkably tough for their weight, like body armor. The standard technique for manufacturing nanofibers is called electrospinning, and it comes in two varieties. In the first, a polymer solution is pumped through a small nozzle, and then a strong electric field stretches it out. The process is slow, however, and the number of nozzles per unit area is limited by the size of the pump hydraulics. The other approach is to apply a voltage between a rotating drum covered by metal cones and a collector electrode. The cones are dipped in a polymer solution, and the electric field causes the solution to travel to the top of the cones, where it’s emitted toward the electrode as a fiber. That approach is erratic, however, and produces fibers of uneven lengths; it also requires voltages as high as 100,000 volts. Thinking small Velásquez-García and his co-authors — Philip Ponce de Leon, a former master’s student in mechanical engineering; Frances Hill, a former postdoc in Velásquez-García’s group who’s now at KLA-Tencor; and Eric Heubel, a current postdoc — adapt the second approach, but on a much smaller scale, using techniques common in the manufacture of microelectromechanical systems to produce dense arrays of tiny emitters. The emitters’ small size reduces the voltage necessary to drive them and allows more of them to be packed together, increasing production rate. 
A scanning electron micrograph of the new microfiber emitters, showing the arrays of rectangular columns etched into their sides. (Courtesy of the researchers) At the same time, a nubbly texture etched into the emitters’ sides regulates the rate at which fluid flows toward their tips, yielding uniform fibers even at high manufacturing rates. “We did all kinds of experiments, and all of them show that the emission is uniform,” Velásquez-García says. To build their emitters, Velásquez-García and his colleagues use a technique called deep reactive-ion etching. On either face of a silicon wafer, they etch dense arrays of tiny rectangular columns — tens of micrometers across — which will regulate the flow of fluid up the sides of the emitters. Then they cut sawtooth patterns out of the wafer. The sawteeth are mounted vertically, and their bases are immersed in a solution of deionized water, ethanol, and a dissolved polymer. When an electrode is mounted opposite the sawteeth and a voltage applied between them, the water-ethanol mixture streams upward, dragging chains of polymer with it. The water and ethanol quickly dissolve, leaving a tangle of polymer filaments opposite each emitter, on the electrode. The researchers were able to pack 225 emitters, several millimeters long, on a square chip about 35 millimeters on a side. At the relatively low voltage of 8,000 volts, that device yielded four times as much fiber per unit area as the best commercial electrospinning devices. The work is “an elegant and creative way of demonstrating the strong capability of traditional MEMS [microelectromechanical-systems] fabrication processes toward parallel nanomanufacturing,” says Reza Ghodssi, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. Relative to other approaches, he adds, there is “an increased potential to scale it up while maintaining the integrity and accuracy by which the processing method is applied.”