Editor's Summary

17 April 2008

Raising the 'anti' in chromium

It is well known that the regions of aligned spins (magnetic domains) in a ferromagnet can influence the electrical properties of the material, so control of domain structure is a promising avenue for manipulating the spins of electrons in the emerging field of 'spintronics'. Less attention has been paid to the domain structure of antiferromagnets, where neighbouring magnetic spins are opposed rather than aligned (these domains have no net magnetism and so are difficult to probe). Now Ravi Kummamura and Yeong-Ah Soh show that pronounced spin-related effects can also be seen in the electrical properties of the archetypical antiferromagnet, chromium. As the effects are at least as large as those seen in ferromagnets, they might to lead to new applications for chromium, already used in integrated circuits and disk drives.

Letter: Electrical effects of spin density wave quantization and magnetic domain walls in chromium

Ravi K. Kummamuru & Yeong-Ah Soh

doi:10.1038/nature06826

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