Well Whattaya Know?

"Ferromagnetic" materials make our computers operate; to vastly oversimplify, magnetic pulses flip the spins of electrons to represent the changes from one to zero in binary computer language. Electrons can have only two spins, and binary language has only zero or one.

As this article at Physics World notes, though, the magnetic pulses needed to flip the electrons take quite a bit of juice to make happen. Which means lots of wasted energy and -- in computer terms -- relative slothfulness as the electrons need tens of nanoseconds to switch. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second, which sounds quite fast compared with how long it takes us to accomplish such time-consuming tasks as blinking an eye. But for computers, which are performing thousands or even millions of such operations in order to function, the amount of time adds up.

"Antiferromagnetic" materials, on the other hand, could potentially switch much faster because they need less energy to do so. They could also be packed in more tightly because the lower energy amounts would also lower the heat of the combined elecrron switches and magnetic pulses. Researchers at MIT also found a way to add more electrons to the substances being used for the transistor manufacture, packing in more than would be found in ordinary concentrations of those elements.

The technical name for this increase in electrons is called "doping," not unlike the way some athletes will have blood drawn from their bodies, wait until their system replaces it and then on the day of competition have their own blood reintroduced. There are supposed to be performance-enhancing effects, although that's not been fully proven.

The quickening of the switch is proven, however, which leads to the article's counter-intuitive headline: "Doped antiferrromagnets switch faster." I had thought that, with the exception of Dr. Johnny Fever, doped things didn't exactly move faster. Perhaps scientists can name the new procedure in his honor.