HARFIR: Heusler Alloy Replacement for Iridium

HARFIR (“Heusler Alloy Replacement for Iridium”) is a 43-month European/Japanese R&D project which started in September 2013. It is a JST-EC DG RTD Coordinated Research Project, being partially funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation through its Framework Programme 7 and also by the Japan Science and Technology Agency through its Strategic International Collaborative Research Program. The goal of the project is to discover an antiferromagnetic alloy that does not contain the rare metal Iridium. Iridium is becoming more and more widely used in numerous spin electronic storage devices, including read heads in hard disk drives.