October 2022

Researchers from Germany's Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics have reported a lift-off and transfer method to fabricate three-dimensional racetrack memories from freestanding magnetic heterostructures grown on a water-soluble sacrificial release layer.

The fabrication of three-dimensional nanostructures is key to the development of next-generation nanoelectronic devices with a low device footprint. Magnetic racetrack memories encode data in a series of magnetic domain walls that are moved by current pulses along magnetic nanowires. To date, most studies have focused on two-dimensional racetracks.

A new instrument called ALICE II is available at BESSY II, that allows magnetic X-ray scattering in reciprocal space using a new large area detector. Recntly, researchers from HZB and Technical University Munich demonstrated the performance of ALICE II by analyzing helical and conical magnetic states of an archetypal single crystal skyrmion host.

The new instrument was conceived and constructed by HZB physicist Dr. Florin Radu and the technical design department at HZB in close cooperation with Prof. Christian Back from the Technical University Munich and his technical support. It is now available for guest users at BESSY II as well.

Scientists from the University of Warsaw, Poland-based Military University of Technology, CNR Nanotec, the University of Southampton and the University of Iceland have designed a new photonic system with electrically tuned topological features, constructed of perovskites and liquid crystals. The new system can be used to create efficient light sources.

Perovskites are highly-studied materials that have the potential to revolutionize the solar energy fields, among others. These are durable and easy-to-produce materials, the special property of which is a high solar light absorption coefficient and they are therefore used to develop new, more efficient photovoltaic cells. In recent years, the emission properties of these materials, so far underestimated, have been used.

Here are some recent and popular spintronics technology news at Spintronics-Info that you may find of interest:

• Researchers take a step towards controlling electron spin at room temperature
• A new multiferroic heterostructure material with the highest spintronic performance in the world
• Researchers use light to control magnetic fields at nanoscale
• QD electrodes used to examine spin transport properties of DNA sensors
• Researchers make strides in graphene spintronics
• Spin-orbit–driven ferromagnetism detected in 'magic-angle' twisted bilayer graphene
• Researchers launch new paradigm in magnetism and superconductivity
• Researchers succeed in measuring the properties of spin waves in graphene
• Unconventional magnetism found at the surface of Sr2RuO4
• Singapore’s NRF gives 'substantial funding' for developing spintronics devices
• IMEC and Intel researchers develop a spintronic logic device
• Graphene used to create a spin field-effect transistor at room temperature

A correlated phase that  electrons can take on is magnetic order, in which they align their spin in the same direction. Traditionally, the ability to manipulate magnetic order within a 2D semiconductor has been limited; scientists have used external magnetic fields, which limit technological integration and potentially conceal interesting phenomena. Now, researchers from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have discovered how to use nanoscale, low-power laser beams to precisely control magnetism within a 2D semiconductor. Their approach could have implications for both studying the emergence of the correlated phase as well as designing new optoelectronic and spintronic devices.

“The fact that we can now use light to manipulate electrons in this way means we have unprecedented control over this magnetic order,” said Asst. Prof. Alex High, the senior author of the new work.

Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and University of Amsterdam have used inelastic neutron scattering and methods of integrability to experimentally observe and theoretically describe a local, coherent, long-lived, quasiperiodically oscillating magnetic state emerging out of the distillation of propagating excitations following a local quantum quench in a Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain.

This “quantum wake” displays similarities to Floquet states, discrete time crystals and nonlinear Luttinger liquids. The team also showed how this technique reveals the non-commutativity of spin operators, and is thus a model-agnostic measure of a magnetic system’s “quantumness.”