One of the issues with modern day computing is the substantial loss of energy due to heat caused by the movement of electrons. This increases the strain on the environment due to requiring more power to be generated and limits the scale at which computers can be built in room temperature conditions as intricate cooling systems are required to prevent overheating. A somewhat recent solution has come from crystals that contain magnetic monopoles. This appears to be a strange thing, as magnetic monopoles don’t exist. While electrons can have a net negative charge, when a magnet is cut in two, it doesn’t split into a north and south pole, but instead into two smaller magnets. What a magnetic monopole means in relation to these crystals, called spin ices, is that the north and south pole can be separated infinitely along a chain of molecules without requiring infinite energy.

Chain connecting two magnetic monopoles (From C. Castelnovo, R. Moessner, and S. L. Sondhi, “Magnetic monopoles in spin ice,” Nature, vol. 451, no. 7174, pp. 42-45, 2008/01/01 2008, doi: 10.1038/nature06433.)
But how can this help the computer industry?
Firstly, the length, orientation and number of these magnetic chains can be controlled by how the crystal was formed, what material is next to the crystal and, most importantly, applied magnetic fields. Once a specific magnetic field has changed the orientation of the magnetic chain, the crystal will remain in that configuration until another field disrupts it. Say, if two such configurations exist, it means that the crystal can store a 1 or a 0 similar to how computers use field effect transistors to do so, but without continually applied voltage being required to maintain it.
This information can then be read, not by a needlessly heat generating electron, but by light. Light is made up of electromagnetic waves, and the waves are affected by any material they pass through, especially if that material has magnetic properties, like the spin ices. Going back to assuming the crystal has two configurations, one for 1 and one for 0. Ideally, when light of a specific wavelength enters that crystal, it will interact in two distinct ways. The clearest of which is when the “1” produces constructive interference (the light interacts in such a way that the wavelengths line up making the light brighter) and the “0” produces destructive interference (each wave of the light is perfectly opposite to another wave of light and they cancel each other out, dimming the light). This means that, based on the configuration of the crystal, a questioning beam of light can be sent in and a 1 or 0 outputted, similar to current computational methods, but with significantly less heat loss due to photons being used instead of electrons and the crystals being stable in either configuration without applied current.

Destructive vs Constructive interference in a Spin Ice material (From J. Chen et al., “Reconfigurable Spin-Wave Interferometer at the Nanoscale,” Nano Letters, vol. 21, no. 14, pp. 6237-6244, 2021/07/28 2021, doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c02010.)
While all of this is interesting, research is still in early days and finding an easily controllable and readable material, that is also environmentally friendly and easy to manufacture, is still underway, as well as the methodology required to integrate this into existing computer systems in a way that is cost effective and efficient. However, while quantum computers are power hungry and seem to be hitting the limits of how far they can be scaled up, this method of crystalline data storage may provide the answer for low power and low heat systems, allowing for larger computers to be built with the same power consumption.
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