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Current technologies for writing, storing, and reading information are either charge-based or spin-based. Semiconductor flash or random access memories are prime examples among the large variety of charge-based devices. They utilize the possibility offered by semiconductors to easily electrically manipulate and detect their electronic charge states representing the “zeros” and “ones”. The downside is that weak perturbations such as impurities, temperature change, or radiation can lead to uncontrolled charge redistributions and, as a consequence, to data loss.

Scientists from the Institute of Physics of the ASCR, together with colleagues from Spain and France presented in the journal Nature Communications new theory of the origin of polyaromatic hydrocarbon molecules in the universe. According to the new theory, these molecules are formed by hydrogen etching of the graphitic surface of the stardust particles.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to François Englert from Belgium and British physicist Peter Higgs for – as the official citation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reads – „the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider“.

Czech physicists contributed to the discovery of new mechanisms for storing information

The Spintronics and Nanoelectronics group from the Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic has completed another successful research project which opens new oportunities for future information technologies.