Project title: Computing with Magnetic Metamaterials
Main applicant: Vassilios Kapaklis, Division of Materials Physics
Grant amount: SEK 672 000 over two years, scholarship to recruit a postdoc
In the past decades, an explosive increase in the number of computations, performed predominantly by digital computers, has imposed an ever-rising demand for energy. Recently, the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) has further intensified this trend. Current semiconductor technology bases its information processing capability on the shrinking size and deterministic control of the device components. But this comes also with a bottleneck, as the ever-increasing component density and operational frequency result in extreme energy consumption and digital computers raise also concerns over cybersecurity. The proposed research targets the exploration of the computational potential of nano-arrays of interacting and thermally active nanomagnets – magnetic metamaterials – by harnessing their dynamics for addressing problems in computation. This will enable new hardware solutions targeted at specific and energy ‘hungry’ computational tasks, such as optimization and ML, in a revolutionary “in materia” scheme.
