Electrical switching of an antiferromagnet

By P. Wadley, B. Howells, J. Železný, C. Andrews, V. Hills, R. Campion, V. Novák, K. Olejník, F. Maccherozzi, S. Dhesi and 12 more. Science, 2015

1,340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Manipulating a stubborn magnet Spintronics is an alternative to conventional electronics, based on using the electron's spin rather than its charge. Spintronic devices, such as magnetic memory, have traditionally used ferromagnetic materials to encode the 1's and 0's of the binary code. A weakness of this approach—that strong magnetic fields can erase the encoded information—could be avoided by using antiferromagnets instead of ferromagnets. But manipulating the magnetic ordering of antiferromagnets is tricky. Now, Wadley et al. have found a way (see the Perspective by Marrows). Running currents along specific directions in the thin films of the antiferromagnetic compound CuMnAs reoriented the magnetic domains in the material. Science, this issue p. 587; see also p. 558 Transport and optical measurements are used to demonstrate the switching of domains in the antiferromagnetic compound CuMnAs. [Also see Perspective by Marrows] Antiferromagnets are hard to control by external magnetic fields because of the alternating directions of magnetic moments on individual atoms and the resulting zero net magnetization. However, relativistic quantum mechanics allows for generating current-induced internal fields whose sign alternates with the periodicity of the antiferromagnetic lattice. Using these fields, which couple strongly to the antiferromagnetic order, we demonstrate room-temperature electrical switching between stable configurations in antiferromagnetic CuMnAs thin-film devices by applied current with magnitudes of order 106 ampere per square centimeter. Electrical writing is combined in our solid-state memory with electrical readout and the stored magnetic state is insensitive to and produces no external magnetic field perturbations, which illustrates the unique merits of antiferromagnets for spintronics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd39110b7cf17e0dc1384c28822eeedd9ff434b7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Alexey V. Kimel
2. B. V. van Wees
3. Xiang Zhang
4. F. Huang
5. A. Kirilyuk
6. Sang-Wook Cheong
7. A. Brataas
8. Axel Hoffmann

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. B. V. van Wees
2. A. Brataas

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Alexey V. Kimel
2. Xiang Zhang
3. A. Kirilyuk
4. A. Brataas
5. B. V. van Wees

Citations in the corpus

• Magnetism, symmetry and spin transport in van der Waals layered systems (2021, neutral): “Also, note that a microscopic calculation would automatically give such reduction, which can be used as a check, or simply one can use the symmetry to reduce calculation cost.”
• Ultrafast nonthermal photo-magnetic recording in transparent medium (2016, methodology): “After each write-read event the recorded domains were erased by application of an external magnetic field of 80 mT in [1-10] direction.”
• Altermagnetism with non-collinear spins (2024, background): “But antiferromagnetic spintronics 1, 3, 9-11 has become highly topical due to the active manipulation of the antiferromagnetic state and its magnetic textures via spin and charge currents.”