ScienceDaily (May 10, 2011) — Magneto-optical effects, which exploit the interaction between light and magnetic materials, have only been relevant for fundamental research and up to now rarely used for applications. Plasmons -- electronic excitations in metals with dimensions at the nanoscale -- recently opened a new way to concentrate light at nanoscale. This allows plasmonic circuits to be built with electrical as well as optical control at this dimension scale. It would be ideal to apply such optical control for processing data on hard drives. In this way, writing and scanning frequencies of up to one billion operations per second, impossible so far, can be achieved.
