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17 Jun 2002
A team of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Caltech scientists have made important breakthroughs in applying a powerful new technique that marries two existingtechnologies to probe materials at a microscopic level. If researchers achieve their ultimate goals for this new technique it could have important applications inmagnetic information storage technology.
Their device combines the techniques of magnetic resonance imaging, which has found powerful applications in the medical field, and atomic force microscopy,which can measure the surface structure of materials with microscopic sensitivity. Researchers call the new approach "magnetic resonance force microscopy."
Magnetic resonance technology provides scientists with information about the electronic structure and magnetic spin dynamics of a sample, but it offers limitedsensitivity, which in turn limits the resolution that can be achieved with the technique. The atomic force microscope measures forces with such high sensitivity that itcan determine surface structure with atomic-scale resolution. Though research into this technology at Los Alamos and elsewhere is still in the early stages, thetechnology has already matched the sensitivity of current state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging technology and promises to achieve even better results.
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