Crucially, the calculations account for realistic experimental limitations, not just idealized conditions. That makes the results more relevant to devices engineers could actually build.

How big are the energy savings?

Computer simulations suggest the optimized pulses could cut switching energy by several orders of magnitude — factors of hundreds or thousands — compared with leading memory technologies in use or under development today, including:

• DRAM, the workhorse memory in most computers
• STT-MRAM, a magnetic memory already in commercial use
• SOT-MRAM, an emerging magnetic technology

More striking still, the predicted energy requirements approach the Landauer limit: the thermodynamic floor that physics imposes on any operation performed on a single bit. No device can process information below that threshold, so nearing it represents a best-case scenario for energy efficiency.

The researchers went beyond theory. The framework, developed with colleagues Mohammad H. Badarneh and PeiYu Cai, includes practical guidance for implementation: optimized device designs and methods for delivering the magnetic fields. These recommendations could help experimental groups test the concept in the lab.

What are the caveats?

The results come from simulations, not physical prototypes. The energy figures are predictions based on a theoretical model, even if that model incorporates realistic constraints. Experimental validation — building devices and measuring their actual switching costs — remains the decisive next step, and the paper itself offers a roadmap rather than a demonstration.

The study also focuses on van der Waals magnets, a class of layered materials, so transferring the approach to other memory platforms would require further work.

Could this work beyond magnetic fields?

Dr. Santos believes the mathematics travels further than the specific system his team studied.

"Every digital operation has an energy cost, and that cost becomes increasingly important as AI and data-intensive technologies continue to expand," he said. "Our work shows that, by carefully designing how a magnetic field changes in time, magnetization can be switched far more efficiently than with conventional approaches."

The same framework, he added, can be adapted to electrical currents and even ultrafast laser pulses — two of the most advanced technologies under investigation for future data storage.

"Although we first developed the theory using magnetic field pulses, the mathematics is far more versatile than that," Dr. Santos said. "That means the ideas developed here could have applications far beyond the systems we studied. It seems that we may have just found the next best thing."

Whether that optimism is warranted will depend on experiments still to come. For now, the Edinburgh framework offers a concrete mathematical recipe for approaching the lowest energy cost physics allows — arriving just as the world's appetite for computation makes that cost matter more than ever.