Spintronics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Research Briefing |

    As counterparts to optical frequency combs, magnonic frequency combs could have broad applications if their initiation thresholds were low and the ‘teeth’ of the comb plentiful. Progress has now been made through exploiting so-called exceptional points to enhance the nonlinear coupling between magnons and produce wider magnonic frequency combs.

  • Article |

    Frequency combs, which are important for applications in precision spectroscopy, depend on material nonlinearities for their function, which can be hard to engineer. Now an approach combining magnons and exceptional points is shown to be effective.

    • Congyi Wang
    • , Jinwei Rao
    •  & Wei Lu

  • Article |

    Understanding the mechanism by which magnons—the quanta of spin waves—propagate is important for developing practical devices. Now it is shown that long-range dipole–dipole interactions mediate the propagation in a van der Waals antiferromagnet.

    • Yue Sun
    • , Fanhao Meng
    •  & Joseph Orenstein

  • Article |

    Time crystals spontaneously produce periodic oscillations that are robust to perturbations. A time crystal phase with a long coherence time has now been produced using the electron and nuclear spins of a semiconductor sample.

    • A. Greilich
    • , N. E. Kopteva
    •  & M. Bayer

  • Article |

    Inducing coherent interactions between distinct magnon modes—collective excitations of magnetic order—has been challenging. A canted antiferromagnet has demonstrated coherent magnon upconversion induced by terahertz laser pulses.

    • Zhuquan Zhang
    • , Frank Y. Gao
    •  & Keith A. Nelson

  • Article |

    Observations of the conversion of orbital angular momentum into charge indicate that the orbital degree of freedom can provide a channel for information storage and processing.

    • Anas El Hamdi
    • , Jean-Yves Chauleau
    •  & Michel Viret

  • News & Views |

    Generating and controlling noncollinear spin textures is a promising route towards developing next-generation logic architectures beyond CMOS. Now, these spin textures can be engineered in twisted magnetic two-dimensional materials.

    • Bevin Huang

  • News & Views |

    Local magnetometry measurements on a magnetic Chern insulator suggest that the Berry curvature of the topological band — responsible for the intrinsic magnetism — also enables ultra-low current switching of the magnetization.

    • Yonglong Xie

  • News & Views |

    Disturbances in the orientation of magnetization in a magnet can propagate as spin waves or magnons. A design that makes it possible to optically excite nanoscale spin waves offers a route to developing miniaturized spin-based devices.

    • Akashdeep Kamra
    •  & Lina G. Johnsen

  • News & Views |

    Experiments with chiral magnets may hold the key to a better understanding of fundamental aspects of transformations between different skyrmionic states, necessary for magnetic memory and logic applications to become a reality.

    • Alexey A. Kovalev

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Magnetic skyrmions—a type of localized spin texture—have been theoretically predicted to annihilate with counterparts known as antiskyrmions. By means of electron microscopy, such annihilation has now been observed in a cubic chiral magnet.

    • Fengshan Zheng
    • , Nikolai S. Kiselev
    •  & Rafal E. Dunin-Borkowski

  • Article |

    Electrical readout of the state of an antiferromagnet is an important goal for spintronic applications. Now, detection of the electrical voltage created by a thermal gradient in a canted antiferromagnet suggests a route for achieving this goal.

    • Weiwei Lin
    • , Jiaming He
    •  & C. L. Chien

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Although magnons in the quantum Hall regime of graphene have been detected, their thermodynamic properties have not yet been measured. Now, a local probe technique enables the detection of the magnon density and chemical potential.

    • Andrew T. Pierce
    • , Yonglong Xie
    •  & Amir Yacoby

  • Letter |

    Propagating spin waves known as magnons are expected to carry a dipole moment in the quantum Hall regime. Now, this moment has been detected, demonstrating that the degrees of freedom of spin and charge are entangled in quantum Hall magnons.

    • A. Assouline
    • , M. Jo
    •  & P. Roulleau

  • News & Views |

    Spin waves can carry information that could be used for data processing, but producing and controlling them can be challenging. Now it is possible to generate short-wavelength coherent spin waves that can travel at high speed over a long distance.

    • Markus Münzenberg

  • Letter |

    Ultrashort light pulses generate nanometre-scale wavepackets of magnons that propagate coherently and at high speed in an antiferromagnet. This pushes antiferromagnetic magnonics forward as a future platform for information processing.

    • J. R. Hortensius
    • , D. Afanasiev
    •  & A. D. Caviglia

  • Letter |

    High-resolution magnetometry shows that the shape of domain walls in Cr2O3 is determined by the energetic cost of their surface area. The walls behave like elastic surfaces that avoid thicker parts of the sample where they would need to be larger.

    • Natascha Hedrich
    • , Kai Wagner
    •  & Patrick Maletinsky

  • News & Views |

    The magnetic properties of intercalated metal dichalcogenides are dramatically affected by small crystal imperfections, potentially providing design principles and materials for spintronic devices.

    • Minhyea Lee

  • Article |

    In principle skyrmions are topologically protected, but the crystal lattice interferes with this protection so that they should be unstable to switching of their winding number. Here this process is understood via scanning tunnelling microscopy.

    • Florian Muckel
    • , Stephan von Malottki
    •  & Markus Morgenstern

  • News & Views |

    Single rare-earth ions are hard to observe and even harder to use as qubits. However, with the help of coupling to an optical cavity and clever engineering of selection rules, a big step has been taken to establish their new role in the quantum world.

    • Roman Kolesov
    •  & Jörg Wrachtrup

  • Letter |

    The authors use spin waves to demonstrate that charged quantum Hall skyrmions exist away from integer filling. They also see evidence of several fractional skyrmion states.

    • H. Zhou
    • , H. Polshyn
    •  & A. F. Young

  • Letter |

    Structures containing multiple skyrmions inside a larger skyrmion—called skyrmion bags—are experimentally created in liquid crystals and theoretically predicted in magnetic materials. These may have applications in information storage technology.

    • David Foster
    • , Charles Kind
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Article |

    The authors use surface acoustic waves, focused in a Gaussian geometry, to manipulate the spin state of divacancy defects in silicon carbide via mechanical driving. They demonstrate that shear strain is important in controlling the spin transitions.

    • Samuel J. Whiteley
    • , Gary Wolfowicz
    •  & David D. Awschalom

  • News & Views |

    Generating pure spin currents is a necessary part of many spintronic devices. Now there is a new mechanism for doing this, utilizing nuclear spin waves.

    • Claudia K. A. Mewes

  • Letter |

    Spin current is generated by pumping from nuclear spin waves. The nuclear magnetic resonance is used to transfer angular momentum from the nuclei of an antiferromagnet to a propagating spin current that is subsequently collected in a distant electrode.

    • Yuki Shiomi
    • , Jana Lustikova
    •  & Eiji Saitoh

  • Article |

    A strong Hall effect is observed in a material with spin textures and strong electron correlations. This hints that correlation effects can amplify real-space topological spin transport.

    • Lorenzo Vistoli
    • , Wenbo Wang
    •  & Manuel Bibes

  • News & Views |

    Applications of spintronics often require angular momentum to be moved from place to place. A possible observation of spin superfluidity may point the way toward the transport of spin angular momentum across an insulating sample with no dissipation or energy loss.

    • Joshua Folk

  • Letter |

    Spins are transmitted over a distance of 5 μm through a piece of antiferromagnetic graphene. This shows that graphene can be a platform to explore the fundamental physics of spin transport in antiferromagnets for application in spintronics.

    • Petr Stepanov
    • , Shi Che
    •  & Chun Ning Lau

  • Comment |

    The variety of emergent phenomena occurring at oxide interfaces has made these systems the focus of intense study in recent years. We argue that spin–orbit effects in oxide interfaces provide a versatile handle to generate, control and convert spin currents, with a view towards low-power spintronics.

    • J. Varignon
    • , L. Vila
    •  & M. Bibes

  • News & Views |

    Many particles — both fundamental and emergent — carry angular momentum or spin. Experiments have now demonstrated that phonons can transport angular momentum, showing that they may have spin too.

    • Matthias B. Jungfleisch
    •  & Axel Hoffmann

  • Perspective |

    As part of a Focus on antiferromagnetic spintronics, this Perspective examines the opportunities afforded by synthetic, as opposed to crystalline, antiferromagnets.

    • R. A. Duine
    • , Kyung-Jin Lee
    •  & M. D. Stiles

  • Editorial |

    The fledgling field of antiferromagnetic spintronics looks set to bring exotic forms of magnetism into the realm of practical applications.

  • Perspective |

    As part of a Focus on antiferromagnetic spintronics, this Perspective looks at the complex and often faster dynamics of antiferromagnetic spin textures.

    • O. Gomonay
    • , V. Baltz
    •  & Y. Tserkovnyak

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