Soon, computers may be built from magnetic 'tornadoes'

A new study has revealed that magnetic 'tornadoes' may play a key role in building up computers in the future.

Dr Tom Hayward said that magnetic materials are useful for data storage because they can retain information without consuming energy.

A computer built around a CPU made of magnetic materials should be much more power proficient than existing technologies, as it should be able to function with minimal energy consumption, he further added.

Using computer simulations, the team have shown it is possible to create magnetic "logic gates," the fundamental building blocks of a CPU, using magnetic materials.

Dr Hayward also mentioned that in wires of magnetic material, two hundred times thinner than a human hair, magnetism can form into swirling "tornadoes," known as magnetic vortex domain walls and in their simulations, they have used vortices where the magnetism turns clockwise to represent 0 and vortices where it turns anticlockwise to represent 1, allowing them to encode binary data.

The vortices are then flowed through the wires using, and interacted with, carefully defined features in the wires that recreate the function of logic gates.

The researchers now plan to build experimental prototypes of the logic gates, and to investigate whether they could be made smaller and to operate faster, critical steps in developing the concept into a usable technology.

The study is published in Physical Review Applied.