Researchers from Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in Korea have demonstrated a novel route to tune and control the magnetic domain wall motions employing combinations of useful magnetic effects inside very thin film materials. The research offers a new insight into spintronics and a step towards new ultrafast, ultrasmall, and power-efficient IT devices.

The new study demonstrates a new way to handle information processing using the movement of the magnetic states of the thin film device. It takes advantage of some unusual effects that occur when materials with contrasting types of magnetic material are squashed together. The research focuses on a device that combines ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials, in which the directions of electron spins align differently within the respective magnetic materials.

An international collaboration led by RMIT has achieved record-high electron doping in a layered ferromagnet, causing magnetic phase transition with significant promise for future electronics.

Control of magnetism (or spin directions) by electric voltage is vital for developing future, low-energy high-speed nano-electronic and spintronic devices, such as spin-orbit torque devices and spin field-effect transistors. Ultra-high-charge, doping-induced magnetic phase transition in a layered ferromagnet allows promising applications in antiferromagnetic spintronic devices.

Researchers at Tohoku University and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have reported a new spintronic phenomenon – a persistent rotation of chiral-spin structure.

The researchers studied the response of chiral-spin structure of a non-collinear antiferromagnet Mn3Sn thin film to electron spin injection and found that the chiral-spin structure shows persistent rotation at zero magnetic field. Moreover, their frequency can be tuned by the applied current.

Scientists from Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) have found a new way to control the alignment state of magnetic atoms in an antiferromagnetic material, showing promise for the development of tiny sensors and memory devices.

The researchers' new approach features a controllable exchange bias effect, which enables the asymmetric magnetic actions of devices comprised of complex combination structure of different types of magnetic materials.

A team of researchers from The University of Groningen and Columbia University have found that 2D spin-logic devices could benefit from magnetic graphene that can efficiently convert charge to spin current, and can transfer this spin-polarization over long distances.

Graphene is known amongst 2D materials for transporting spin information, but cannot generate spin current unless its properties are modified – conventionally cobalt ferromagnetic electrodes are used for injecting and detecting the spin signal.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have used a nanoscale synthetic antiferromagnet to control the interaction between magnons — research that could lead to faster and more energy-efficient computers.

In ferromagnets, electron spins point in the same direction. To make future computer technologies faster and more energy-efficient, spintronics research employs spin dynamics — fluctuations of the electron spins — to process information. Magnons, the quantum-mechanical units of spin fluctuations, interact with each other, leading to nonlinear features of the spin dynamics. Such nonlinearities play a central role in magnetic memory, spin torque oscillators, and many other spintronic applications.

Antiferromagnetic (AFM) spintronics are devices or components for electronics that couple a flowing current of charge to the ordered spin 'texture' of specific materials. The successful development of AFM spintronics could have important implications, as it could lead to the creation of devices or components that surpass Moore's law. But it seems that finding materials with the exact characteristics necessary to fabricate AFM spintronics is highly challenging.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee have recently identified a new quantum material (Fe_1/3 + _δNbS₂) that could be used to fabricate AFM spintronic devices. In their most recent papers, they demonstrated the feasibility of using this material for two AFM spintronics applications.

Researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Charles University in Prague, ETH Zurich and other universities in Europe recently introduced a method to achieve the quenching of antiferromagnets into high resistivity states by applying either electrical or ultrashort optical pulses. This strategy could open interesting new avenues for the development of spintronic devices based on antiferromagnets.

Antiferromagnetism is a type of magnetism in which parallel but opposing spins occur spontaneously within a material. Antiferromagnets, materials that exhibit antiferromagnetism, have advantageous characteristics that make them particularly promising for fabricating spintronic devices. Due to their ultrafast nature, their insensitivity to external magnetic fields and their lack of magnetic stray fields, antiferromagnets could be particularly desirable for the development of spintronic devices. However, despite their advantages, most simple antiferromagnets have weak readout magnetoresistivity signals. Moreover, so far scientists have been unable to change the magnetic order of antiferromagnets using optical techniques, which could ultimately allow device engineers to exploit these materials' ultrafast nature.

A team of researchers has discovered a mechanism in antiferromagnets that could be useful for spintronic devices. They theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that one of the magnetization torques arising from optically driven excitations has a much stronger influence on spin orientation than previously given credit for. The result of their study could provide a new and efficient mechanism for manipulating spin. which has so far proven to be a challenging task.

Antiferromagnetic materials (AFMs) are good candidates for spintronics because they are resistant to external magnetic fields and allow for switching spin values in timescales of picoseconds. One promising strategy to manipulate spin orientation in AFMs is using an optical laser to create extremely short-lived magnetic field pulses, a phenomenon known as the inverse Faraday effect (IFE). Although the IFE in AFMs generates two very distinct types of torque (rotational force) on their magnetization, it now seems the most important of the two has been somewhat neglected in research.

Researchers from Exeter University, in collaboration with the Universities of Oxford, California Berkeley, and the Advanced and Diamond Light Source have experimentally demonstrated that high frequency alternating spin currents can be transmitted by, and sometimes amplified within, thin layers of antiferromagnetic NiO.

The researchers say that these results demonstrate that the spin current in thin NiO layers is mediated by evanescent spin waves, a mechanism akin to quantum mechanical tunnelling. This could lead to more efficient future wireless communication technology based on such antiferromagnetic spintronics devices.