Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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PV: Plenarvorträge

PV XVI

PV XVI: Plenary Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 14:00–14:45, H15

Antiferromagnetic spintronics — •Tomas Jungwirth — Institute of Physics ASCR, Cukrovarnicka 10, 162 00 Praha 6, Czech Republic and School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK

Interesting and useless - this was the common perception of antiferromagnets expressed explicitly, e.g., in the 1970 Nobel lecture of Louis Néel. Connecting to this traditional notion we can define antiferromagnetic spintronics as a field that makes antiferromagnets useful and spintronics more interesting. We will give an overview of this emerging field whose aim is to complement or replace ferromagnets in active components of memory, logic, or other spintronic devices. Antiferromagnetic materials are magnetic inside, however, the direction of their ordered microscopic moments alternates between individual atomic sites. The resulting zero net magnetic moment implies that if information was stored in antiferromagnets it would be invisible to common magnetic probes, insensitive to disturbing magnetic fields, and the antiferromagnetic element would not affect magnetically its neighbors no matter how densely the elements were arranged in a device. The intrinsic high frequencies of antiferromagnetic dynamics represent another property that makes antiferromagnets attractive alternatives to ferromagnets. Among the outstanding questions is how to efficiently manipulate and detect magnetic states of an antiferromagnet. In the lecture we will focus on electrical reading and writing of information, combined with robust storage, that has be recently realized in antiferromagnetic memories via relativistic quantum mechanics phenomena.

P. Wadley et al. Science 14 January (2016), DOI: 10.1126/science.aab1031