AN INTERNATIONAL team of physicists has created the world’s smallest
racetrack. It’s made from semiconductor rings so tiny that just a single
electron races around inside each one. Such minuscule rings, just 50 nanometres
across, could perhaps form the basis of a high-capacity computer memory, storing
a digital 1 when the electron is going round the circuit and a 0 when at rest.
According to Mauro Boero of Cambridge University, the research is “extremely
interesting . . . It opens a new way of storing information in a dot by means of
magnetisation.”
The rings are a variation on the…
