No Arabic abstract
The recently discovered electrical-induced switching of antiferromagnetic (AF) materials that have spatial inversion asymmetry has enriched the field of spintronics immensely and opened the door for the concept of antiferromagnetic MRAM. CuMnAs is one promising AF material that exhibits such electrical switching ability, and has been studied to switch using electrical pulses of length millisecond down to picosecond, but with little focus on nanosecond regime. We demonstrate here switching of CuMnAs/GaP using nanosecond pulses. Our results showed that in the nanosecond regime low-energy switching, high readout signal with highly reproducible behaviour down to a single pulse can be achieved. Moreover, a comparison of the two switching methods of orthogonal switching and polarity switching was done on same device showing two different behaviours that can be exploited selectively for different future memory/processing applications.
Antiferromagnets (AFs) attract much attention due to potential applications in spintronics. Both the electric current and the electric field are considered as tools suitable to control properties and the Neel vector direction of AFs. Among AFs, CuMnAs has been shown to exhibit specific properties that result in the existence of the current-induced spin-orbit torques commensurate with spin directions and topological Dirac quasiparticles. Here, we report on the observation of a reversible effect of an electric field on the resistivity of CuMnAs thin films, employing ionic liquid as a gate insulator. The data allow to determine the carrier type, concentration, and mobility independently of the Hall effect that may be affected by an anomalous component.
We unravel the origin of current-induced magnetic switching of insulating antiferromagnet/heavy metal systems. We utilize concurrent transport and magneto-optical measurements to image the switching of antiferromagnetic domains in specially engineered devices of NiO/Pt bilayers. Different electrical pulsing and device geometries reveal different final states of the switching with respect to the current direction. We can explain these through simulations of the temperature induced strain and we identify the thermomagnetoelastic switching mechanism combined with thermal excitations as the origin, in which the final state is defined by the strain distributions and heat is required to switch the antiferromagnetic domains. We show that such a potentially very versatile non-contact mechanism can explain the previously reported contradicting observations of the switching final state, which were attributed to spin-orbit torque mechanisms.
We show scalable and complete suppression of the recently reported terahertz-pulse-induced switching between different resistance states of antiferromagnetic CuMnAs thin films by ultrafast gating. The gating functionality is achieved by an optically generated transiently conductive parallel channel in the semiconducting substrate underneath the metallic layer. The photocarrier lifetime determines the time scale of the suppression. As we do not observe a direct impact of the optical pulse on the state of CuMnAs, all observed effects are primarily mediated by the substrate. The sample region of suppressed resistance switching is given by the optical spot size, thereby making our scheme potentially applicable for transient low-power masking of structured areas with feature sizes of ~100 nm and even smaller.
We theoretically study the influence of a predominant field-like spin-orbit torque on the magnetization switching of small devices with a uniform magnetization. We show that for a certain range of ratios (0.23-0.55) of the Slonczewski to the field-like torques, it is possible to deterministically switch the magnetization without requiring any external assist field. A precise control of the pulse length is not necessary, but the pulse edge sharpness is critical. The proposed switching scheme is numerically verified to be effective in devices by micromagnetic simulations. Switching without any external assist field is of great interest for the application of spin-orbit torques to magnetic memories.
In a ferromagnetic nanodisk, the magnetization tends to swirl around in the plane of the disk and can point either up or down at the center of this magnetic vortex. This binary state can be useful for information storage. It is demonstrated that a single nanosecond current pulse can switch the core polarity. This method also provides the precise control of the core direction, which constitutes fundamental technology for realizing a vortex core memory.