Progress in developing nanophotonic devices capable of withstanding high temperatures and harsh conditions for applications including data storage, sensing, health care and energy will depend on the research community and industry adopting new "plasmonic ceramic" materials, according to a commentary this week in the journal Science.
In one promising nanophotonic approach – plasmonics - clouds of electrons called surface plasmons are used to manipulate and control light on the nanometer scale. Plasmonic devices under development often rely on the use of metals such as gold and silver, which are not practical for most industrial applications because they are unable to withstand extreme heating and other harsh conditions. They also are not compatible with the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) manufacturing process used to construct integrated circuits.
Now researchers are proposing the use of plasmonic ceramics such as titanium nitride and zirconium nitride instead of gold and silver.
Science - All that glitters need not be gold
Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is an emerging technology enabling ultra-dense storage of digital information. It promises to usher in the next generation of ultra-high capacity data storage devices, expanding the current computer hard disk drive (HDD) capabilities by a factor of 10 to 16. There is an urgent need for such data storage systems, as the rate of digital content creation is exploding world-wide.
A major challenge hindering commercialization of HAMR has been the lack of a robust nanoscale heating system, whose function is to locally and transiently raise the temperature of resilient magnetic materials used for HAMR, facilitating data recording. Such a system must be able to focus a laser beam onto a small enough region of the data storage medium (so that bits of data occupy the smallest area possible), while withstanding the thermal and mechanical stresses of prolonged operation.
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