Thin film technology – the application of materials ranging between several micrometers and a fraction of a nanometer in thickness – is increasingly becoming a major focus of scientific and technological approaches to tackling climate change. A number of green thin film technologies are in use today or are being developed, from successful experiments with thin film biofilters to the growing use of thin film battery technology, and now to the mainstream application of thin film photovoltaics.

At the Department for Materials of the ETH in Zurich, Pietro Gambardella and his collaborators investigate tomorrow’s memory devices. They should be fast, retain data reliably for a long time and also be cheap. So-called magnetic “random access memories” (MRAM) achieve this quadrature of the circle by combining fast switching via electric currents with durable data storage in magnetic materials.