The Ohio State collaborators are one of a handful of successful teams to win this award in an international competition as part of DARPA's Topological Excitations in Electronics (TEE) program. TEE endeavors to design materials with new, controllable functionalities in memory, logic, sensors and quantum information processing — all having critical implications for the nation's economic, energy and defense security.

In magnetic memories, information (for example, a collection of bits) is stored as clusters of spins, which are either an up or a down (or put differently, a one or a zero). These spin clusters, which form the basis of magnetic memories, become less stable when reduced in size.

"As the spin clusters become smaller and smaller, the memory becomes volatile," says Mohit Randeria, professor of physics and principal investigator on the DARPA grant. "Even minor fluctuations due to thermal disturbances at room temperature could lead to spin directions flipping and information being lost."