Researchers at the University of Vienna have designed a 3D magnetic nanonetwork, where magnetic monopoles emerge due to rising magnetic frustration among the nanoelements, and are stable at room temperature.

The new three dimensional (3D) nano-network could mean a new era in modern solid state physics, with numerous applications in photonics, bio-medicine, and spintronics. The realization of 3D magnetic nano-architectures could enable ultra-fast and low-energy data storage devices.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, together with their colleagues, have shown the conversion of a spin current into a rotating charge current vortex using numerical simulations.

This new approach can contribute to the emergence of energy efficient spintronic devices, as it helps to convert between electrical current vortices and a spin current and vice versa. The team came up with the idea of ​​exploiting the Rashba effect – an unusual phenomenon that was discovered in 1959. It occurs on some surfaces or interfaces between two materials where the atomic structure is no longer symmetrical. The Rashba effect causes the spin and the orbital motion of an electron to interact.

A China-Australia collaboration has, for the first time, illustrated that Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI), an antisymmetric exchange vital for forming various chiral spin textures such as skyrmions, can be induced in a layered material tantalum-sulfide (TaS₂) by intercalating iron atoms, and can further be tuned by gate-induced proton intercalation.

Magnetic-spin interactions that allow spin-manipulation by electrical control allow potential applications in energy-efficient spintronic devices.

An international research team, including scientists from the Institute of Molecular Science of the University of Valencia (ICMol), has discovered how to control spin waves using light in an insulating material formed by magnetic layers. This could be a step towards a new generation of devices that store and transport information in a highly efficient way and with very low consumption.

If throwing a stone into a pond generates a wave that propagates over the surface of the water, something similar happens when the action of a magnet or a pulse of light, for example, propagates over a magnetic material – made up of small magnets (spines) connected to each other – and produces what is known as a ‘spin wave’.

Researchers at Tohoku University and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have reported a new spintronic phenomenon – a persistent rotation of chiral-spin structure.

The researchers studied the response of chiral-spin structure of a non-collinear antiferromagnet Mn3Sn thin film to electron spin injection and found that the chiral-spin structure shows persistent rotation at zero magnetic field. Moreover, their frequency can be tuned by the applied current.

A team of researchers from The University of Groningen and Columbia University have found that 2D spin-logic devices could benefit from magnetic graphene that can efficiently convert charge to spin current, and can transfer this spin-polarization over long distances.

Graphene is known amongst 2D materials for transporting spin information, but cannot generate spin current unless its properties are modified – conventionally cobalt ferromagnetic electrodes are used for injecting and detecting the spin signal.

Researchers at Aalto University have developed a new device for spintronics, which could be seen as a step towards using spintronics to make computer chips and devices for data processing and communication technology.

Schematic of the experimental geometry. Image from article

"If you use spin waves, it's transfer of spin, you don't move charge, so you don't create heating," says Professor Sebastiaan van Dijken, who leads the group that wrote the paper. The device the team made is a Fabry-Pérot resonator, a well-known tool in optics for creating beams of light with a tightly controlled wavelength. The spin-wave version made by the researchers in this work allows them to control and filter waves of spin in devices that are only a few hundreds of nanometres across.

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), Tianjin University in China and Tohoku University in Japan recently reported that, when driven out of equilibrium by magnetic fields, a universal Doppler effect limits the maximal spin current in magnetic insulators.

This finding is a surprising analogy to what happens in superconductors driven by electric fields and could provide a fundamental design principle for future nano-devices with computing science and power applications.

Researchers used the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, to study ways to manipulate electron spins and develop new materials for spintronics. The research team, led by Chang-Beom Eom at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, designed a new material that has three times the storage density and uses much less power than other spintronics devices.

Not many of these types of materials exist, especially ones that work at room temperature like this one. If the new material can be perfected, it could aid in the creation of more efficient electronic devices with less tendency to overheat. This is particularly important for advancing the development of low-power computing and fast magnetic memory.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, along with collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have discovered a light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery was made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.

Weyl and Dirac semimetals can host exotic, nearly dissipationless, electron conduction properties that take advantage of the unique state in the crystal lattice and electronic structure of the material that protects the electrons from doing so. These anomalous electron transport channels, protected by symmetry and topology, don't normally occur in conventional metals such as copper. After decades of being described only in the context of theoretical physics, there is growing interest in fabricating, exploring, refining, and controlling their topologically protected electronic properties for device applications. For example, wide-scale adoption of quantum computing requires building devices in which fragile quantum states are protected from impurities and noisy environments. One approach to achieve this is through the development of topological quantum computation, in which qubits are based on "symmetry-protected" dissipationless electric currents that are immune to noise.