Researchers can magnetize graphene using hydrogen and could enable 1 milion fold improvement over todays hard drives

Graphene, an atomically thin sheet of carbon, has been intensively studied for the last decade to reveal exceptional mechanical, electrical, and optical properties. Recently, researchers have started to explore an even more surprising property—magnetism. Theories and experiments have suggested that either defects in graphene or chemical groups bound to graphene can cause it to exhibit magnetism; however, to date there was no way to create large-area magnetic graphene which could be easily patterned. Now, scientists from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have found a simple and robust means to magnetize graphene using hydrogen.

The questions now facing the researchers are how fine the patterning of hydrogen can be and for how long the ferromagnetism can be stable. If those questions are answered, this technique could lead to a storage medium with a single hydrogenated-carbon pair storing a single magnetic bit of data, a roughly greater than million-fold improvement over current hard drives.

Magnetic force microscopy image of a section of a large array that Naval Research Laboratory scientists generated by electron-beam lithography. This map of the magnetic strength shows the ferromagnetic, hydrogenated graphene lattice and the 500 nm wide, nonmagnetic, graphene squares. (Photo: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)

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