Scientists are using vibrating nanoscale drumheads to study how magnetism moves and changes inside special materials — a discovery that could help power the next generation of fast, energy-efficient computers.
A team of physicists and engineers has discovered a new way to eavesdrop on some of the most elusive and subtle magnetic phenomena in nature — using membranes so thin and sensitive they can hear what no traditional probes could see or sense.
In a study funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of researchers led by Xiao-Xiao Zhang, Ph.D., assistant professor in Physics at the University of Florida, in collaboration with Philip Feng, Ph.D., Wally Rhines Professor for Quantum Engineering in UF’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, created tiny, ultra-thin drum-like membranes made from a special magnetic material called manganese phosphorus trisulfide.
These “nano drums” are only a few atoms thick. In fact, they can be as thin as a single layer of atomic crystals. The diameters of these drumhead membranes are just a few micrometers, about one-tenth of the diameter of human hair. The thickness of such a drumhead is about a thousand times smaller than their diameters, built from just a few layers of atoms stacked together.
Vibrating Nano Drums Reveal the Hidden Movements of Magnetism
How can you play such super tiny drums? Where are the drumsticks?
“We apply very low-power radio-frequency signals to tiny electrodes built underneath the drumheads, and very gentle laser beams, to play such small drums inside a vacuum chamber in my lab at UF,” said Zhang, assistant professor in physics and an expert in nanoscale optics and 2D materials who’s the lead principal investigator and senior author of this work. “As we excite and play these drumheads on their vibrational modes or tones, we monitor and exploit such tones as ultrasensitive probes to help us ‘hear’ or ‘sense’ intricate and subtle effects that are otherwise undetectable.
“When we apply a magnetic field, it’s like stretching the drumhead membrane and thus altering its sound pitch and tones,” explained Zhang. “The mechanical resonance frequency shifts and what we’re hearing — mechanically — are the complex, dynamic rearrangements of domains of magnetization moments and spins at the nanoscale.”
The findings, recently published in a cover story in Advanced Materials, open new ways to explore and control the tiny magnetic patterns inside layered materials. Understanding these patterns could lead to next-generation technologies for data storage, computing and even quantum devices.
By making the tiny membranes vibrate and measuring how they moved, the researchers noticed sudden changes in their vibration frequency, a sign that the magnetic properties inside the material were shifting.
“It’s like the spin system inside the crystal is speaking through the membrane,” said Enamul Yousuf, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher and the first author of this work. “These nanoscale resonators are so sensitive, they can feel the movements of magnetic domain walls—boundaries between different domains of magnetization or spin configurations—even when other techniques fail to pick it up.”
When Magnetism Flows Like Water
“What we found in our experiments was beyond expectations,” said Zhang.
When scientists increased the magnetic field strength, they saw the material’s magnetism flip directions, something they expected. But at a higher level of magnetic field, they found a surprise: a second, hidden change in the material’s magnetism. This sudden shift made the tiny “nano drums” lose their rhythm and vibrate differently, uncovering a previously unknown magnetic behavior that could help scientists better understand how magnetism works at the atomic scale.
Discovery of fluid-like magnetic motion in ultra-thin materials could lead to faster, more efficient data storage and next-generation computing technologies.
Using advanced computer models, scientists found that the surprise behavior comes from waves of magnetic motion racing through the material — moving faster than a speeding bullet. These fast, fluid-like motions stir up the magnetic landscape and even make the crystal structure itself stretch and twist slightly, thanks to a property called magnetostriction, where magnetism and motion are tightly connected.
When scientists pushed the nano drumheads to vibrate harder, the drums started breaking the rules. Their vibrations bent, flipped, and changed in unpredictable ways — even switching from stiffening to softening as the magnetic field shifted. This strange behavior, never before seen in a 2D magnetic material, reveals a whole new level of control over how magnetism and motion interact.
Understanding and harnessing this behavior could lead to smarter, faster, and more energy-efficient technologies — from advanced sensors to future quantum computers that rely on the interplay between magnetic and mechanical forces.
According to the researchers, it could open the door to new types of magnetic field sensors, mechanical logic elements, and quantum hybrid devices.
“The nonlinear mechanical response gives us an even richer window into the spin texture dynamics,” said Feng.
A New Spin on Spintronics
Normally, it’s very hard to measure how magnetism moves inside certain materials — called antiferromagnets — because their internal magnetic forces cancel each other out. Traditional tools can’t easily see what’s happening. But this research team found a clever workaround: Instead of trying to measure the magnetism directly, they looked at how the material itself flexed and vibrated when the magnetism changed.
This new mechanical method gives scientists a powerful way to study how magnetism behaves in ultra-thin materials, something that was nearly impossible before.
“The ability to hear the whispers of spins through mechanical resonances opens a new chapter in spintronics,” Zhang said. “And because 2D materials are so versatile, we expect this technique to extend to many other systems, including those hosting skyrmions, vortices or quantum spin liquids. This also paves the way toward using mechanical degrees of freedom to control spins—an exciting prospect for next-generation quantum technologies.
“These new materials and their internal multiphysics coupling effects are fascinating,” added Feng. “It is inspiring to bring together physics and engineering researchers across two colleges, to explore new frontiers.”
On the engineering side, Feng’s group leveraged their many years of expertise in creating ultra-small devices that combine electronics, mechanics and light, built from atomically thin materials.
The other co-authors and collaborators are:
Yunong Wang, an ECE Ph.D. student, John Koptur-Palenchar, Ph.D. student in physics, Shreyas Ramachandran, Ph.D. student, and Professor Elton Santos, both in Physics at University of Edinburgh (UK) and Chiara Tarantini, Ph.D., Li Xiang, Ph.D. Stephen McGill, Ph.D., and Dmitry Smirnov, Ph.D., researchers all from the National High Magnetic Field Lab in Tallahassee, FL.