Client: Paul Scherrer Institute PSI
Magazine: 5232 — The magazine of the Paul Scherrer Institute
Issue 3/2019

Copper and co

I was once again able to contribute the two illustrations for the double-page spread in the Products & Little Helpers section of PSI Magazine 5232. This time it was about so-called multiferroic materials, which can be used to produce very energy-saving data storage devices. Unfortunately, this energy-saving phenomenon usually works at temperatures far below freezing, which is anything but practical. Researchers at PSI have now succeeded in creating such a material from copper and iron, which retains its special properties even at 100°C – even a computer running at full speed would no longer be a problem for this new generation of hard disk. On the next page you can see what else is being done with the copper and iron powder required for this. Geologists from Finland used 50,000 miniature coffee spoons in a mine to generate a three-dimensional map of the rock composition using these countless miniature samples.

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