In a paper published today in Nature Materials, a team led by University of Glasgow physicists describe how they were able to pass information from a series of tiny magnets arranged on an ultra-thin film to magnets on a second film below. This new form of magnetic interaction makes a formerly two-dimensional phenomenon three dimensional, and the discovery may lead to advances in spintronics. “It’s a bit like being given an extra note in a musical scale to play with,” said Glasgow University’s Dr. Amalio Fernández-Pacheco. “It opens up a whole new world of possibilities, not just for conventional information processing and storage, but potentially for new forms of computing we haven’t even thought of yet.”