Recent Spintronic News - Page 2

A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, the University of Edinburgh, the Donostia International Physics Center and the University of Arkansas has revealed how magnetic domains behave inside 2D van der Waals magnets based on Fe₃GeTe₂ (FGT), providing a roadmap for tuning skyrmions using material thickness and magnetic‑field conditions. 

The researchers worked with a thin, layered FGT flake whose thickness changed gradually across the sample, creating regions that behave differently magnetically while still being part of the same crystal. Because FGT in this study is magnetic only at low temperature, the flake was cooled with liquid nitrogen to cryogenic temperatures while an out‑of‑plane magnetic field was applied (field cooling), setting up well‑defined initial domain patterns.

Researchers from the University of Konstanz, Institute of Science Tokyo and TU Dortmund University recently demonstrated that coherent terahertz (THz) magnons can transfer their coherence to electronic charges in the insulating antiferromagnet NiO, providing a crucial step toward energy‑efficient, THz‑speed spintronic devices compatible with CMOS technology. The core idea is that optically driven THz spin waves imprint a coherent, charge‑dominated signal onto the material’s optical response, realizing a spin‑to‑charge conversion stage mediated by light.

Collective spin excitations - magnons, i.e., quantized spin waves of large spin ensembles - naturally operate in the THz range and promise low‑loss information transfer, but integrating them with conventional electronics requires converting their spin signal into an electrical one. In this work, the team uses NiO as a prototypical dielectric antiferromagnet and excites coherent THz magnons with femtosecond laser pulses whose photon energy lies below the 4 eV bandgap, so that the primary excitation channel addresses the spin system rather than creating a dense electron–hole plasma.

Researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, CNRS AND Radboud University recently demonstrated that tiny magnetic vortices can host self-induced Floquet states driven purely by internal magnon dynamics, without the need for high-power laser fields. By periodically modulating the vortex core with low-power microwave excitation, they engineer Floquet bands in the magnon spectrum and observe clear frequency-comb signatures in nanometer-scale magnetic disks.

Floquet engineering uses a periodic drive to create effective Hamiltonians and band structures that do not exist in equilibrium, enabling exotic states and modified spin interactions. In this work, the periodic drive is not an external optical field but arises from internal modes of a magnetic vortex in an ultrathin disk, where the magnetization curls in-plane and forms a nanoscale vortex core with out-of-plane orientation. When microwave magnons are driven strongly enough, nonlinear coupling transfers energy into a circular gyration of the vortex core, which then acts as a time-periodic perturbation that renormalizes the magnon band structure.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and University of Nevada have proposed a new class of quantum materials - superconducting altermagnets - that could carry persistent spin-polarized currents with zero dissipation, marking a potential breakthrough in superconducting spintronics. 

The team's theoretical study shows how these materials can host spin supercurrents that remain stable even in the presence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and magnetic disorder - conditions that usually extinguish spin transport in normal metals.

Here are some recent and popular spintronics industry and research news that you may find of interest:

• Spin-controlled photon emission in 2D perovskites enables quantum communication
• Rhombus-shaped nanographenes enable room-temperature pure spin currents
• Researchers succeed in directly tracking how chiral nanowires control electron spins
• The Faraday effect’s hidden magnetic dimension
• Researchers develop a digital spintronic compute-in-memory macro for energy AI
• AI framework accelerates discovery of antiferromagnets for next‑gen spintronics
• Wrinkles in 2D materials could enable efficient spintronic devices
• Breakthrough method uncovers hidden magnetic signals in non-magnetic metals
• Researchers observe spin currents in graphene without magnetic fields
• Researchers observe a new form of magnetism
• Researchers show that light can interact with single-atom layers
• New antiferromagnetic spintronics project receives funding of nearly $4 million
• TDK announces the world's first "Spin Photo Detector" with 10X data transmission speeds
• Intel unveils a highly promising MESO spintronics device architecture
• Researchers use perovskite materials and light to control electron spins

A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill research team has demonstrated a novel way to encode quantum information directly within the light produced by two-dimensional perovskites - opening a potential path to simpler, more efficient quantum communication systems. The study explores how spin dynamics in two-dimensional organic–inorganic hybrid perovskite (2D-OIHP) quantum wells can generate polarization-encoded photons suitable for secure communication protocols.

Two-dimensional perovskites are well known for their performance in light-emitting and photovoltaic devices, but the UNC team, led by Professor Andrew Moran, has shown they can also act as microscopic light sources whose intrinsic exciton spin behavior defines the polarization of emitted photons. When ultrafast laser pulses excite the material, they generate pairs of bound charge carriers - excitons - whose spins determine the polarization of emitted light.

Researchers from The University of Manchester have discovered that interfacing magnetic thin films with atomically thin molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) fundamentally alters how these films dissipate energy - a step toward practical, wafer‑scale 2D spintronic devices.

Using ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) spectroscopy, the team investigated spin pumping and damping mechanisms in large‑area transition‑metal dichalcogenide (TMD)-ferromagnet heterostructures, specifically MoS₂–Ni₀.₈Fe₀.₂ bilayers with varying ferromagnetic thickness. The MoS₂ was grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD), an industry‑compatible approach that allows uniform monolayer and bilayer coverage across wafer‑scale samples.

Researchers from ETH Zürich, University of Washington, University of Basel and National Institute for Materials Science have demonstrated all-optical control over the spin-valley polarization in twisted molybdenum ditelluride (t‑MoTe₂) homobilayers - a step toward dynamically reconfigurable quantum materials and optically defined topological circuits. The work shows how circularly polarized light can reversibly switch the magnetic orientation of a strongly correlated ferromagnetic state, all without changing the sample temperature.

The experiments, led by Prof. Ataç Imamoğlu (ETH Zürich), Prof. Tomasz Smoleński (University of Basel), and colleagues, exploit a system where two atomically thin MoTe₂ layers are stacked with a small twist angle. This twist creates a moiré superlattice with flat, valley‑contrasting Chern bands, giving rise to highly correlated quantum phases - including Chern insulators and ferromagnetic metals - depending on the electron filling. Because the electronic bands are nearly dispersionless, electron-electron interactions dominate, resulting in spontaneous spin alignment even at cryogenic but steady temperatures.

Researchers from the University of Stuttgart, University of Washington, University of Edinburgh, University of Waterloo, the National Institute for Materials Science, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a new type of long‑range magnetic order in twisted double‑bilayer chromium triiodide (CrI₃). 

The study reports a “super‑moiré” magnetic state that extends far beyond the conventional moiré unit cell - highlighting twist angle as a powerful tool to engineer topological spin textures in 2D magnets.

Researchers from the University of Maryland, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Nankai University, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of California, University of Tennessee, Air Force Research Laboratory and Rice University recently reported the first experimental realization of non-volatile, electrical control of magnetism in a two-dimensional (2D) material system. The collaborative work demonstrates a robust interferroic magnetoelectric coupling in a van der Waals heterostructure made of atomic layers of ferroelectric CuCrP₂S₆ and ferromagnetic Fe₃GeTe₂ - marking a milestone for 2D multiferroic research and energy-efficient spintronic applications.

At the heart of this work lies the long-standing challenge of stabilizing ferroic order in truly two-dimensional materials. While ferroelectric and ferromagnetic phenomena are both well-established in bulk materials, their coexistence in 2D is difficult to maintain due to depolarization fields and thermal fluctuations that destabilize long-range order. The team overcame these limitations by stacking exfoliated layers of the ferroelectric CuCrP₂S₆ and ferromagnetic Fe₃GeTe₂ with atomically clean interfaces, enabling short-range, interfacial coupling between their ferroic orders.