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Recent experiments show how lubricants ore lost from computer hard disk drives due to loser heating.
Since the first computer hard disk drive was introduced in the mid1950s, there has been an inexorable increase in storage capacity From the first systems that required 50, twofoot diameter disks to store only five megabytes of memory to today's storage densities of 300 GBit per square inch.
Because the flying height of the slider is equivalent to a jet airliner cruising a few millimeters above the earth, much of this growth in storage density has been due to the development of novel perfluoropolyether lubricants.
However, Further increases in memory density will require making smaller and smaller magnetic domains for the magnetic switches that form the bits on the hard disk. Since magnetism is a collective phenomenon, it requires a certain size to form the magnetic domain, which means as the domain size gets smaller the resulting magnet becomes weaker.
One solution to this problem has been to use magnetic materials with a high coerdvity that...