No Arabic abstract
The quantum mechanical screening of a spin via conduction electrons depends sensitively on the environment seen by the magnetic impurity. A high degree of responsiveness can be obtained with metal complexes, as the embedding of a metal ion into an organic molecule prevents intercalation or alloying and allows for a good control by an appropriate choice of the ligands. There are therefore hopes to reach an on demand control of the spin state of single molecules adsorbed on substrates. Hitherto one route was to rely on switchable molecules with intrinsic bistabilities triggered by external stimuli, such as temperature or light, or on the controlled dosing of chemicals to form reversible bonds. However, these methods constrain the functionality to switchable molecules or depend on access to atoms or molecules. Here, we present a way to induce bistability also in a planar molecule by making use of the environment. We found that the particular habitat offered by an antiphase boundary of the Rashba system BiAg$_2$ stabilizes a second structure for manganese phthalocyanine molecules, in which the central Mn ion moves out of the molecular plane. This corresponds to the formation of a large magnetic moment and a concomitant change of the ground state with respect to the conventional adsorption site. The reversible spin switch found here shows how we can not only rearrange electronic levels or lift orbital degeneracies via the substrate, but even sway the effects of many-body interactions in single molecules by acting on their surrounding.
We study a high-TC superconducting (YBa2Cu3O7-d) / ferromagnetic (Co/Pt multilayer) hybrid which exhibits resistance switching driven by the magnetic history: depending on the direction of the external field, a pronounced decrease or increase of the mixed-state resistance is observed as magnetization reversal occurs within the Co/Pt multilayer. We demonstrate that stray magnetic fields cause these effects via i) creation of vortices/antivortices and ii) magnetostatic pinning of vortices that are induced by the external field.
The theory behind the electrical switching of antiferromagnets is premised on the existence of a well defined broken symmetry state that can be rotated to encode information. A spin glass is in many ways the antithesis of this state, characterized by an ergodic landscape of nearly degenerate magnetic configurations, choosing to freeze into a distribution of these in a manner that is seemingly bereft of information. In this study, we show that the coexistence of spin glass and antiferromagnetic order allows a novel mechanism to facilitate the switching of the antiferromagnet Fe$_{1/3+delta}$NbS$_2$, which is rooted in the electrically-stimulated collective winding of the spin glass. The local texture of the spin glass opens an anisotropic channel of interaction that can be used to rotate the equilibrium orientation of the antiferromagnetic state. The use of a spin glass collective dynamics to electrically manipulate antiferromagnetic spin textures has never been applied before, opening the field of antiferromagnetic spintronics to many more material platforms with complex magnetic textures.
Quantum spin Hall (QSH) materials promise revolutionary device applications based on dissipationless propagation of spin currents. They are two-dimensional (2D) representatives of the family of topological insulators, which exhibit conduction channels at their edges inherently protected against scattering. Initially predicted for graphene, and eventually realized in HgTe quantum wells, in the QSH systems realized so far, the decisive bottleneck preventing applications is the small bulk energy gap of less than 30 meV, requiring cryogenic operation temperatures in order to suppress detrimental bulk contributions to the edge conductance. Room-temperature functionalities, however, require much larger gaps. Here we show how this can be achieved by making use of a new QSH paradigm based on substrate-supported atomic monolayers of a high-Z element. Experimentally, the material is synthesized as honeycomb lattice of bismuth atoms, forming bismuthene, on top of the wide-gap substrate SiC(0001). Consistent with the theoretical expectations, the spectroscopic signatures in experiment display a huge gap of ~0.8 eV in bismuthene, as well as conductive edge states. The analysis of the layer-substrate orbitals arrives at a QSH phase, whose topological gap - as a hallmark mechanism - is driven directly by the atomic spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Our results demonstrate how strained artificial lattices of heavy atoms, in contact with an insulating substrate, can be utilized to evoke a novel topological wide-gap scenario, where the chemical potential is located well within the global system gap, ensuring pure edge state conductance. We anticipate future experiments on topological signatures, such as transport measurements that probe the QSH effect via quantized universal conductance, notably at room temperature.
The type-II terminated 1T-TaS$_2$ surface of a three-dimensional 1T-TaS$_2$ bulk material realizes the effective spin-1/2 degree of freedom on each David-star cluster with ${T^2=-1}$ such that the time reversal symmetry is realized anomalously, despite the bulk three-dimensional 1T-TaS$_2$ material has an even number of electrons per unit cell with ${T^2=+1}$. This surface is effectively viewed as a spin-1/2 triangular lattice magnet, except with a symmetry-protected topological bulk. We further propose this surface termination realizes a spinon Fermi surface spin liquid with the surface fractionalization but with a non-exotic three-dimensional bulk. We analyze possible experimental consequences of the type-II terminated surface spin liquid.
Recent experiments on switching antiferromagnetic domains by electric current pulses have attracted a lot of attention to spin-orbit torques in antiferromagnets. In this work, we employ the tight-binding model solver, kwant, to compute spin-orbit torques in a two-dimensional antiferromagnet on a honeycomb lattice with strong spin-orbit interaction of Rashba type. Our model combines spin-orbit interaction, local s-d-like exchange, and scattering of conduction electrons on on-site disorder potential to provide a microscopic mechanism for angular momentum relaxation. We consider t