West Virginia University, in partnership with the University of Delaware, has been awarded a four-year, $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR) to develop magnetic materials that can be switched using electrical pulses alone, without an applied magnetic field. The project, titled "Spin Control via Topology, Symmetry and Dimensionality," is led by WVU physicist Mikel Holcomb, with UD co-principal investigator Ryan Comes and colleagues Joshua Zide and John Xiao; UD's share of the award comes to close to $1.4 million.
Magnetic materials already anchor widely used memory technologies such as hard drives, but changing their magnetic state normally requires generating a magnetic field, a comparatively energy-hungry and hard-to-miniaturize approach. Controlling magnetism directly with electricity instead, by manipulating electron spin, could enable more energy-efficient memory and tighter integration of magnetic storage with conventional electronics, one of the central goals driving spintronics research.
The team's material system of choice is altermagnets, a recently identified class of magnetic materials that combines characteristics of ferromagnets, whose magnetic moments align, and antiferromagnets, whose moments oppose each other. Alongside that work, the project will also study how light can be used to control electron spin in nanoscale semiconductor structures. "We're trying to understand the properties of these novel materials at a fundamental level and then ask: How can we put them into a device or use them for future technologies?" said Comes, associate professor of materials science and engineering at UD.
The two universities are splitting complementary roles. At UD, Comes and Zide will synthesize the materials, each specializing in different material classes, drawing on capabilities including UD's Materials Growth Facility; Xiao, Unidel professor in UD's Department of Physics and Astronomy, will work to connect that materials synthesis to how the compounds could function inside real devices. WVU's team, led by Holcomb, contributes complementary characterization capabilities, including synchrotron measurements and optical spectroscopy. "They have characterization capabilities that differ from what we can do here at UD, and we have exceptional synthesis capabilities, including those available through our Materials Growth Facility," said Zide, professor and chair of UD's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "Growing a material here and sending it to WVU for detailed characterization combines our strengths to move the research forward."
The award builds on an existing UD-WVU research relationship and includes a WVU-hosted summer school on quantum materials, along with researcher travel between the two campuses to run experiments and share expertise. The researchers frame the ultimate payoff as materials that let magnetism be controlled directly with electricity, cutting the energy needed to switch magnetic states and opening the door to smaller, more energy-efficient devices for computing and sensing.