Spin Transfer Torques in MnSi at Ultralow Current Densities

By F. Jonietz, S. Mühlbauer, C. Pfleiderer, A. Neubauer, W. Münzer, A. Bauer, T. Adams, R. Georgii, P. Böni, R. Duine and 3 more. Science, 2010

1,053 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spin Control Controlling and manipulating the spin of an electron is a central requirement for applications in spintronics. Some of the challenges researchers are facing include efficient creation of spin currents, minimization of Joule heating, and extending the lifetime of electronic spins, which is especially important for quantum information applications. Costache and Valenzuela (p. 1645) address the first challenge by designing and fabricating an efficient and simple superconducting-based single-electron transistor that can produce spin current with controlled flow. Key to the design is asymmetric tunneling, which leads to a ratchet effect (or diode-like behavior), allowing the separation of up and down spins. Jonietz et al. (p. 1648) use electric currents five orders of magnitude smaller than those used previously in nanostructures to manipulate magnetization in a bulk material, MnSi, pointing the way toward decreased Joule heating in spintronic devices. This so-called spin-torque effect causes the rotation of the skyrmion lattice of spins, characteristic of MnSi, which is detected by neutron scattering. Finally, McCamey et al. (p. 1652) extend the short lifetime of an electronic spin of a phosphorous dopant by mapping it onto the much longer lived nuclear spin of the atom. Mapping the nuclear spin back onto the electronic spin allows production of a spin memory with a storage time exceeding 100s, which should prove useful for future practical applications. A complicated spin texture lattice in a bulk material rotates under the influence of a tiny electrical current. Spin manipulation using electric currents is one of the most promising directions in the field of spintronics. We used neutron scattering to observe the influence of an electric current on the magnetic structure in a bulk material. In the skyrmion lattice of manganese silicon, where the spins form a lattice of magnetic vortices similar to the vortex lattice in type II superconductors, we observe the rotation of the diffraction pattern in response to currents that are over five orders of magnitude smaller than those typically applied in experimental studies on current-driven magnetization dynamics in nanostructures. We attribute our observations to an extremely efficient coupling of inhomogeneous spin currents to topologically stable knots in spin structures.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/566826ac5e24b815bba5f8a7301f5415667566c1

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Skyrmions in magnetic multilayers (2017, background): “2 Real space topological physics As a result of their spin topological properties, magnetic skyrmions provide a unique platform to study many intriguing real-space topological transport phenomena that could bridge topology and magnetism together [38, 52, 54, 57, 64-66], as shown in Figs.”
The 2017 Magnetism Roadmap (2017, neutral): “Where experiments do exist, motion is often very stochastic and critical current densities for the onset of motion are higher than expectations based on results from B20 systems [57].”
Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, background): “Compared to the DWs, critical currents for driving skyrmions can be orders of magnitude lower, and the SOT is again expected to provide higher efficiency than the STT (Jonietz et al., 2010; Sampaio et al., 2013).”