A new study, coordinated by ICN2 group leaders and ICREA professors Prof. Stephan Roche and Prof. Sergio O. Valenzuela, and by Prof. Hyunsoo Yang from the National University of Singapore, examined the current developments and challenges in regards to MRAM, and outlined the opportunities that can arise by incorporating two-dimensional material technologies. It highlighted the fundamental properties of atomically smooth interfaces, the reduced material intermixing, the crystal symmetries and the proximity effects as the key drivers for possible disruptive improvements for MRAM at advanced technology nodes.

The research was carried out by a collaboration of various members of the Graphene Flagship project consortium, including various institutes of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, France), Imec (Belgium), Thales Research and Technology (France), and the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), as well as key industries such as Samsung Electronics (South Korea) and Global Foundries (Singapore).

Researchers at Cornell University and University of Nebraska have discovered a strategy to switch the magnetization in thin layers of a ferromagnet. This a technique has the potential to lead to the development of more energy-efficient magnetic memory devices.

Scientists have been trying for many years to change the orientation of electron spins in magnetic materials by manipulating them with magnetic fields. But researchers including Dan Ralph, the F.R. Newman Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's senior author, have instead looked to using spin currents carried by electrons, which exist when electrons have spins generally oriented in one direction.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln's scientist Christian Binek and University at Buffalo's Jonathan Bird and Keke He have teamed up to develop the first magneto-electric transistor.

Along with curbing the energy consumption of any microelectronics that incorporate it, the team's design could reduce the number of transistors needed to store certain data by as much as 75%, said Nebraska physicist Peter Dowben, leading to smaller devices. It could also lend those microelectronics steel-trap memory that remembers exactly where its users leave off, even after being shut down or abruptly losing power.

Scientists from MIT, Arizona State University, National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Université de Liège in Belgium and Italy's CNR-SPIN have discovered an exotic "multiferroic" state in a material that is as thin as a single layer of atoms.

Their observation is the first to confirm that multiferroic properties can exist in a perfectly two-dimensional material. The findings could pave the way for developing smaller, faster, and more efficient data-storage devices built with ultrathin multiferroic bits, as well as other new nanoscale structures.

A research team from Brown University has found a surprising new phenomenon that can arise in 'magic-angle graphene' - two sheets of graphene that are stacked together at a particular angle with respect to each other, giving rise to various fascinating behaviors. In a recent research, the team showed that by inducing a phenomenon known as spin-orbit coupling, magic-angle graphene becomes a powerful ferromagnet.

"Magnetism and superconductivity are usually at opposite ends of the spectrum in condensed matter physics, and it's rare for them to appear in the same material platform," said Jia Li, an assistant professor of physics at Brown and senior author of the research. "Yet we've shown that we can create magnetism in a system that originally hosts superconductivity. This gives us a new way to study the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism, and provides exciting new possibilities for quantum science research."

Researchers at Tohoku University and the University of Gothenburg have designed a new spintronics technology for brain-inspired computing.

Sophisticated cognitive tasks, such as image and speech recognition, have seen recent breakthroughs thanks to deep learning. Even so, the human brain still executes these tasks without exerting much energy and with greater efficiency than any computer. The development of energy-efficient artificial neurons capable of emulating brain-inspired processes has therefore been a major research goal for decades.

Researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, Argonne National Laboratory, Nanjing University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, have developed an ultrathin magnet that operates at room temperature. This development could lead to new applications in computing and electronics - such as high-density, compact spintronic memory devices - and new tools for the study of quantum physics.

"We're the first to make a room-temperature 2D magnet that is chemically stable under ambient conditions," said senior author Jie Yao, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and associate professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. "This discovery is exciting because it not only makes 2D magnetism possible at room temperature, but it also uncovers a new mechanism to realize 2D magnetic materials," added Rui Chen, a UC Berkeley graduate student in the Yao Research Group and lead author on the study.

Tohoku University researchers have developed a technology for the nanosecond operation of the spintronics-based probabilistic bit (p-bit) - referred to as the "poor man's quantum bit" (q-bit).

The late physicist R.P. Feynman envisioned a probabilistic computer: a computer that is capable of dealing with probabilities at scale to enable efficient computing. "Using spintronics, our latest technology made the first step in realizing Feynman's vision," said Shun Kanai, professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University and lead author of the study.

Some of the latest advances in spintronics are based on nanometric thin film structures with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in which the spin currents are used to produce changes in the magnetization of a magnetic layer. This effect is known as spin-orbit torque (SOT) and can be enhanced by suitably engineering multilayer stacks composed by alternated magnetic/non-magnetic metals. The typical structures employed to manipulate the magnetization via SOT are multilayers whose basic constituent is a ferromagnetic layer adjacent to heavy metal(s), which confer large spin-orbit coupling and promote the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. These systems are the basic elements for spin-orbit torque magnetization switching, used in the next generation of magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) devices.

The SpinOrbitronics research team, guided by Dr. Paolo Perna at IMDEA Nanociencia, have observed the emergence of an interfacially enabled increase of the spin-orbit torque when an ultrathin Cu interlayer is inserted between Co and Pt in symmetric Pt/Co/Pt trilayer, in which the effective spin-orbit torque is expected to vanish. The enhancement of SOT is accompanied by a reduction of the spin-Hall magnetoresistance, indicating that the spin memory loss effect in the Co/Cu and Cu/Pt interfaces is responsible of both enhanced SOT and reduction in the spin-Hall magnetoresistance.

A research team, led by Dr. Kim Kyoung-Whan at the Center for Spintronics of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), has proposed a new principle which could give a boost to spin memory devices.

Conventional memory devices are classified into volatile memories, such as RAM, that can read and write data quickly, and non-volatile memories, such as hard-disk, on which data are maintained even when the power is off. In recent years, related academic and industrial fields have been working to accelerate the development of next-generation memory that is fast and capable of maintaining data even when the power is off.