Ohio researchers make MRI breakthrough

As well as biomedical imaging, the development is said to hold promise in data storage applications.

Chris Hammel, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Experimental Physics, and his colleagues took a magnetic disk measuring two micrometres wide and 40 nanometres thick and were able to obtain magnetic resonance images of its interior.

The resulting image – with each ‘pixel’ one-tenth the size of the disk itself – is claimed to be the highest-resolution image ever taken of the magnetic fields and interactions inside of a magnet.

Studying the material’s behaviour at these scales is key to incorporating them into computer chips and other electronic devices.

In 2008, Hammel’s team debuted a new kind of high-resolution scanning system that combines MRI, ferromagnetic resonance and atomic force microscopy.

Ferromagnets were used in this study. Because ferromagnets retain a particular polarisation once magnetised, they are already essential components in computers and other electronics, where they provide data storage alongside computer chips. Smaller magnets built directly into a computer chip could do even more, Hammel said.