No Arabic abstract
Spintronics, since its inception, has mainly focused on ferromagnetic materials for manipulating the spin degree of freedom in addition to the charge degree of freedom, whereas much less attention has been paid to antiferromagnetic materials. Thanks to the advances of micro-nano-fabrication techniques and the electrical control of the Neel order parameter, antiferromagnetic spintronics is booming as a result of abundant room temperature materials, robustness against external fields and dipolar coupling, and rapid dynamics in the terahertz regime. For the purpose of applications of antiferromagnets, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the antiferromagnetic dynamics at the microscopic level. Here, we first review the general form of equations that govern both antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic dynamics. This general form unifies the previous theories in the literature. We also provide a survey for the recent progress related to antiferromagnetic dynamics, including the motion of antiferromagnetic domain walls and skyrmions, the spin pumping and quantum antiferromagnetic spintronics. In particular, open problems in several topics are outlined. Furthermore, we discuss the development of antiferromagnetic quantum magnonics and its potential integration with modern information science and technology.
Inducing long-range magnetic order in three-dimensional topological insulators can gap the Diraclike metallic surface states, leading to exotic new phases such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect or the axion insulator state. These magnetic topological phases can host robust, dissipationless charge and spin currents or unique magnetoelectric behavior, which can be exploited in low-energy electronics and spintronics applications. Although several different strategies have been successfully implemented to realize these states, to date these phenomena have been confined to temperatures below a few Kelvin. In this review, we focus on one strategy, inducing magnetic order in topological insulators by proximity of magnetic materials, which has the capability for room temperature operation, unlocking the potential of magnetic topological phases for applications. We discuss the unique advantages of this strategy, the important physical mechanisms facilitating magnetic proximity effect, and the recent progress to achieve, understand, and harness proximity-coupled magnetic order in topological insulators. We also highlight some emerging new phenomena and applications enabled by proximity coupling of magnetism and topological materials, such as skyrmions and the topological Hall effect, and we conclude with an outlook on remaining challenges and opportunities in the field.
The interest in two-dimensional and layered materials continues to expand, driven by the compelling properties of individual atomic layers that can be stacked and/or twisted into synthetic heterostructures. The plethora of electronic properties as well as the emergence of many different quasiparticles, including plasmons, polaritons, trions and excitons with large, tunable binding energies that all can be controlled and modulated through electrical means has given rise to many device applications. In addition, these materials exhibit both room-temperature spin and valley polarization, magnetism, superconductivity, piezoelectricity that are intricately dependent on the composition, crystal structure, stacking, twist angle, layer number and phases of these materials. Initial results on graphene exfoliated from single bulk crystals motivated the development of wide-area, high purity synthesis and heterojunctions with atomically clean interfaces. Now by opening this design space to new synthetic two-dimensional materials beyond graphene, it is possible to explore uncharted opportunities in designing novel heterostructures for electrical tunable devices. To fully reveal the emerging functionalities and opportunities of these atomically thin materials in practical applications, this review highlights several representative and noteworthy research directions in the use of electrical means to tune these aforementioned physical and structural properties, with an emphasis on discussing major applications of beyond graphene 2D materials in tunable devices in the past few years and an outlook of what is to come in the next decade.
Spin waves (SWs), the collective precessional motion of spins in a magnetic system, have been proposed as a promising alternative system with low-power consumption for encoding information. Spin Hall nano-oscillator (SHNO), a new-type spintronic nano-device, can electrically excite and control spin waves in both nanoscale magnetic metals and insulators with low damping by the spin current due to spin Hall effect. Here, we will review recent progress about spin-wave excitation and experimental parameters dependent spectrum in SHNOs. The nanogap SHNOs based on in-plane magnetization Py/Pt exhibits a nonlinear self-localized bullet soliton localized at the center of the gap between the electrodes and a secondary high-frequency mode which coexists with the primary bullet mode at higher currents. While in the nanogap SHNOs with strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), besides both nonlinear bullet soliton and propagating spin-wave mode are achieved and controlled by varying the external magnetic field and current, the magnetic bubble skyrmion mode also can be excited at a low in-plane magnetic field. These SW modes show thermal-induced mode hopping behavior at high temperature due to the coupling between modes mediated by thermal-magnon-mediated scattering. Moreover, thanks to PMA-induced effective field, a single coherent mode also can be achieved without applying an external magnetic field. The strong nonlinear effect of spin-waves makes SHNOs easy to achieve synchronization with external microwave signals or mutual synchronization between multiple oscillators with improving the coherence and power of oscillation modes significantly. Spin-waves in SHNOs with an external free magnetic layer have a wide range of applications from as a nanoscale signal source of low-power consumption magnonic devices to spin-based neuromorphic computing systems in the field of artificial intelligence.
Individual, luminescent point defects in solids so called color centers are atomic-sized quantum systems enabling sensing and imaging with nanoscale spatial resolution. In this overview, we introduce nanoscale sensing based on individual nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. We discuss two central challenges of the field: First, the creation of highly-coherent, shallow NV centers less than 10 nm below the surface of single-crystal diamond. Second, the fabrication of tip-like photonic nanostructures that enable efficient fluorescence collection and can be used for scanning probe imaging based on color centers with nanoscale resolution.
We report point-contact measurements of anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) in a single crystal of antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mott insulator Sr2IrO4. The point-contact technique is used here as a local probe of magnetotransport properties on the nanoscale. The measurements at liquid nitrogen temperature revealed negative magnetoresistances (MRs) (up to 28%) for modest magnetic fields (250 mT) applied within the IrO2 a-b plane and electric currents flowing perpendicular to the plane. The angular dependence of MR shows a crossover from four-fold to two-fold symmetry in response to an increasing magnetic field with angular variations in resistance from 1-14%. We tentatively attribute the four-fold symmetry to the crystalline component of AMR and the field-induced transition to the effects of applied field on the canting of AFM-coupled moments in Sr2IrO4. The observed AMR is very large compared to the crystalline AMRs in 3d transition metal alloys/oxides (0.1-0.5%) and can be associated with the large spin-orbit interactions in this 5d oxide while the transition provides evidence of correlations between electronic transport, magnetic order and orbital states. The finding of this work opens an entirely new avenue to not only gain a new insight into physics associated with spin-orbit coupling but also better harness the power of spintronics in a more technically favorable fashion.