“Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are working on replacing these bar magnets with tiny magnetic vortices, known as skyrmions. These vortices, which are as small as billionths of a meter, form in certain magnetic materials and have the potential to bring about a new generation of microelectronics for memory storage in high-performance computers.”

“We estimate the skyrmion energy efficiency could be 100 to 1000 times better than current memory in the high-performance computers used in research,” McCray said.”