The continuous and rapid increase of areal density in magnetic data storage systems required a continuous increase of the coercivity of the storage media. In order to be able to record on these everhigher-coercivity media, new soft magnetic materials for pole tips with increased magnetic moment had to be developed. Significant progress has been made during the last few years in electroplating a...

Metallic nickel nanowires with excellent physical properties have been introduced into polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix to form polymer nanocomposites. Nanowires were synthesized by template-assisted electrochemical deposition. By utilizing ferromagnetic nickel nanowires, small external magnetic field can be used to control their alignment and distribution during composite synthesis. Unlike d...

Using first principles density functional theory, we investigate the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of isolated and bundled Mo(6)S(9 - x)I(x) nanowires with x = 3, 4.5, and 6. The unit cell of each system contains two Mo(6) octahedra decorated with S and I atoms and two S(3) linkages. Due to the bistability of each sulfur linkage, finite-length nanowires or nanowire bundles exhi...

Effects of irradiation on the electronic conductance in nanowires, for field-free conditions and under the influence of applied longitudinal magnetic fields, were investigated. The nanowires were modeled within the free-electron framework with a parabolic ~transverse! confining potential. Our results for the dependence of the photoconductance of irradiated nanowires on the photon energy and/or ...

As devices shrink, there is a requirement to characterize the magnetic properties of individual inhomogeneous nanosized components. Here the site-specific giant magnetoresistance (GMR) of individual NiFe/Pt multilayer nanowires has been evaluated in the current perpendicular to plane (CPP) geometry using a new in-situ method directly inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM). In this method a...

More recently, motivated by extensively technical applications of carbon nanostructures, there is a growing interest in exploring novel non-carbon nanostructures. As the nearest neighbor of carbon in the periodic table, boron has exceptional properties of low volatility and high melting point and is stronger than steel, harder than corundum, and lighter than aluminum. Boron nanostructures thus ...

Co/Cu multilayered nanowires were electrochemically fabricated using a pulsed current deposition technique into a nanochannel template. Time-dependence of deposition current was monitored to determine the growth rate of Co and Cu nanowires. Co layer and Cu layer thicknesses were adjusted to several tens nanometers, by controlling the deposition times. With decreasing the each layer thickness, t...

A series of Co1 xCux (x 1⁄4 0:05{0:70) composite nanowire arrays have been electrodeposited in alumina templates. An apparent pH value rule for nanowire phase and composition has been found. Based on it, composite nanowires can be obtained and the composition becomes more controllable. In the composite nanowires, the cubic and hexagonal structures coexisted. The specific magnetic properties, co...

The controlled motion of a series of domain walls along magnetic nanowires using spin-polarized current pulses is the essential ingredient of the proposed magnetic racetrack memory, a new class of potential non-volatile storage-class memories. Using permalloy nanowires, we achieved the successive creation, motion, and detection of domain walls by using sequences of properly timed, nanosecond-lo...

We report an innovative strategy to obtain cylindrical nanowires combining well established and low-cost bottom-up methods such as template-assisted nanowires synthesis and electrodeposition process. This approach allows the growth of single-layer or multi-segmented nanowires with precise control over their length (from few nanometers to several micrometers). The employed techniques give rise t...