No Arabic abstract
We report electrical current switching of noncollinear antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mn$_3$GaN/Pt bilayers at room temperature. The Hall resistance of these bilayers can be manipulated by applying a pulse current of $1.5times10^6$~A/cm$^2$, whereas no significant change is observed up to $sim10^8$~A/cm$^2$ in Mn$_3$GaN single films, indicating that the Pt layer plays an important role. In comparison with ferrimagnetic Mn$_3$GaN/Pt bilayers, a lower electrical current switching of noncollinear AFM Mn$_3$GaN is demonstrated, with a critical current density two orders of magnitude smaller. Our results highlight that a combination of a noncollinear AFM antiperovskite nitride and a spin-torque technique is a good platform of AFM spintronics.
Noncollinear antiferromagnets have promising potential to replace ferromagnets in the field of spintronics as high-density devices with ultrafast operation. To take full advantage of noncollinear antiferromagnets in spintronics applications, it is important to achieve efficient manipulation of noncollinear antiferromagnetic spin. Here, using the anomalous Hall effect as an electrical signal of the triangular magnetic configuration, spin-orbit torque switching with no external magnetic field is demonstrated in noncollinear antiferromagnetic antiperovskite manganese nitride Mn$_3$GaN at room temperature. The pulse-width dependence and subsequent relaxation of Hall signal behavior indicate that the spin-orbit torque plays a more important role than the thermal contribution due to pulse injection. In addition, multistate memristive switching with respect to pulse current density was observed. The findings advance the effective control of noncollinear antiferromagnetic spin, facilitating the use of such materials in antiferromagnetic spintronics and neuromorphic computing applications.
We present the detailed inelastic neutron scattering measurements of the noncollinear antiferromagnet Mn$_3$Ge. Time-of-flight and triple-axis spectroscopy experiments were conducted at the temperature of 6~K, well below the high magnetic ordering temperature of 370~K. The magnetic excitations have a 5-meV gap and display an anisotropic dispersive mode reaching $simeq 90$~meV at the boundaries of the magnetic Brillouin zone. The spectrum at the zone center shows two additional excitations that demonstrate characteristics of both magnons and phonons. The textit{ab initio} lattice-dynamics calculations show that these can be associated with the magnon-polaron modes resulting from the hybridization of the spin fluctuations and the low-energy optical phonons. The observed magnetoelastic coupling agrees with the previously found negative thermal expansion in this compound and resembles the features reported in the spectroscopic studies of other antiferromagnets with the similar noncollinear spin structures.
The tetragonal ferrimagnetic Mn$_3$Ga exhibits a wide range of intriguing magnetic properties. Here, we report the emergence of topologically nontrivial nodal lines in the absence of spin orbit coupling (SOC) which are protected by both mirror and $C_{4z}$ rotational symmetries. In the presence of SOC we demonstrate that the doubly degenerate nontrivial crossing points evolve into $C_{4z}$-protected Weyl nodes with chiral charge of $pm$2. Furthermore, we have considered the experimentally reported noncollinear ferrimagnetic structure, where the magnetic moment of the Mn$_I$ atom (on the Mn-Ga plane) is tilted by an angle $theta$ with respect to the crystallographic $c$ axis. The evolution of the Weyl nodes with $theta$ reveals that the double Weyl nodes split into a pair of charge-1 Weyl nodes whose separation can be tuned by the magnetic orientation in the noncollinear ferrimagnetic structure.
While the electrical current manipulation of antiferromagnets (AFMs) has been demonstrated, the extent of the studied AFM materials has been limited with few systematic experiments and a poor understanding. We compare the electrical current switching of the exchange-bias field ($H_{ex}$) in AFM-Mn$_3A$N/ferromagnet-Co$_3$FeN bilayers. An applied pulse current can manipulate $H_{ex}$ with respect to the current density and FM layer magnetization, which shifts exponentially as a function of the current density. We found that the saturation current density and exponential decay constant $tau$ increase with the local moment of AFM Mn atoms. Our results highlight the effect of the AFM local moment to electrical current switching of $H_{ex}$, although it has a near-zero net magnetization, and may provide a facile way to explore the electrical current manipulation of AFM materials.
The Weyl antiferromagnet Mn$_3$Sn has recently attracted significant attention as it exhibits various useful functions such as large anomalous Hall effect that are normally absent in antiferromagnets. Here we report the thin film fabrication of the single phase of Mn$_3$Sn and the observation of the large anomalous Hall effect at room temperature despite its vanishingly small magnetization. Our work on the high-quality thin film growth of the Weyl antiferromagnet paves the path for developing the antiferromagnetic spintronics.