The broad area of research which links together the activities of these staff is that of magnetic and optical information storage. This is the technology of computer disk drives (including Microdrives such as used in the ‘I’ pod), optical and magneto-optical disk systems, ‘spintrononic’ magnetic solid state memory devices such as MRAM, tape recording computer back-up and video players, credit card readers, magnetic sensors as well as some novel information storage systems such as ‘I’ paper.

A number of spin-off research projects (generating 8 patents) have also been carried out. These include theoretical work on new ‘negative’ composite materials at optical frequencies, thin film piezo-actuators, advanced information coding systems for multilevel information storage, magnetic heads for security applications, a magnetic ‘barcode’ system using amorphous glass-coated magnetic microwire, optical fibre sensors for detecting hydrogen and advanced low-field sensors for use in sub-nanoTesla detection of magnetic fields. 

The general future thrust is towards computer memories with higher storage densities (towards 1 Terabit/square inch on disk, and greater than 10 Gbits/square inch on tape, intelligent multilevel recording, magnetic random access memory (MRAM), advanced detection using spintronics, giant magnetoimpedance and asymmetric field function computer modelled nanoscale heads, 3D optical recording, advanced coding systems including turbo codes and very high rate data detection/transfer in excess of 3 Gbits/second.