“Manipulating the magnetization at the nanoscale with femtosecond laser pulses”

Ezio Iacocca

Monday, April 4th at 4:00pm

Magnetic materials have been used for information storage for decades, ever since the inception of the first hard drive. The reason for this application is that magnets have well-defined orientations that remain stable for hundreds of years. The traditional method to change such an orientation is with another magnet. However, new mechanisms to manipulate the magnetization are now available, namely, light-matter interaction at the femtosecond scale. Research on this field has exploded since the first observation in 1996 and continues to be a fascinating topic of non-equilibrium physics. [Read more…]