At minus 269 degrees Celsius, deep inside a lab at Hebrew University, a tiny magnetic whirlpool just a fraction of a millimeter wide is pointing the way to a future of nearly frictionless computing. This speck of physics, known as a superconducting vortex, isn’t just a curiosity—it’s the heart of a new kind of memory bit that uses almost the least energy possible to store information.
Every time a computer erases a bit, physics sets a hard floor on how little energy it can use. This is called Landauer's limit, a fundamental law discovered in the 1960s. For decades, engineers have dreamed of building devices that come close. Today’s computers use over a million times more energy than that limit for each bit erased. But now, a team led by Dr. Yonathan Anahory and Nofar Fridman has built a memory device that slashes that waste dramatically.
Their device uses a single magnetic vortex trapped in a superconducting material cooled to just 4 Kelvin. The vortex can sit in one of two positions, representing a 0 or a 1. By shifting it between these spots, the team can write and erase a bit of data. The breakthrough came when they measured how much energy the switch required—and found it was only about five times Landauer's limit. That’s the closest any superconducting memory has ever come to this theoretical minimum.
Measuring such a tiny energy loss was a feat in itself. The team didn’t rely on heat, which is too small to detect. Instead, they used an ultrasensitive tool called a SQUID-on-tip microscope to track the vortex’s magnetic movement. This allowed them to calculate energy use with extreme precision. “A vortex is an exceptionally small and delicate object, so measuring the energy dissipated by its motion is a major experimental challenge,” said Fridman. “By following its magnetic response, we were able to compare its energy cost with the fundamental limits of information processing.”
The device won’t replace your laptop’s memory anytime soon—it only works near absolute zero. But that’s exactly the environment where quantum computers live. This means such vortex-based memory could one day store classical data inside quantum machines with almost no energy waste. While still a prototype, it proves that superconducting vortices can be more than just physics puzzles—they could be the building blocks of ultra-efficient computing.
As researchers work to scale the design, the real promise lies in what it teaches us: that nature’s energy limits aren’t just theoretical. They’re within reach.