A newly discovered particle could lead to peanut-sized computer hard drives and iPod drives that would be dwarfed by an ant.
The skyrmion could also help researchers create faster, smaller, computers Discovery News reported.
Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany made the computer-shrinking discovery.
The researchers described skyrmions as a "a knot-like magnetic entity," a NanoScience press release reported.
The team figured out how to write and delete these particles, and found they had a unique "vortex" shape, which would make them great storage vessels.
Data storage usually is enabled by magnetic fields, Discovery News reported. To make an electric field, all of the electrons inside the magnet's atoms must line up together.
"Those fields embedded into a metal alloy are what make up the 1s and 0s, the bits, a computer data," Discovery News reported.
Regular magnetic electrons need to have a sufficient amount of space between them, otherwise they will cause the fields to "stick together" and interfere with the data.
The skyrmion is different because it has electrons that "point in different directions," making it less likely the fields will stick together.
Since skyrmion's have less sticky fields, scientists can place them much closer to each other and create smaller devices. The skyrmion electrons could be spaced out only six nanometers apart, the best scientists have done in the past is 25.
To create the particles, researchers put "a two-atom-thin film of palladium and iron into a magnetic field and cooled it to nearly absolute zero," according to Discovery News. This process immediately "wrote" the skyrmion. In order to "annihilate" them, the team fired a "beam of electrons" onto the film holding the newly-discovered particles.
"We transferred the idea of tying a knot to memorize something to the field of storage technology so we can now store data in a two-dimensional magnetic knot," Dr. Kirsten von Bergmann, senior scientist of the Wiesendanger group, said, according to the press release.
The next step for the researchers will be to find a way to create the particles at room temperature. The achievement would mean smaller, faster, less power-hungry devices. Skyrmions were found to require 100,000 times less power than a common hard drive, according to Discovery News.
