A tenet of special relativity is that no particle can exceed the speed of light. In certain magnetic materials, the maximum magnon group velocity serves as an analogous relativistic limit for the speed of magnetic solitons. Here, we drive domain walls to this limit in a low-dissipation magnetic insulator using pure spin currents from the spin Hall effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWidespread applications of magnetic devices require an efficient means to manipulate the local magnetization. One mechanism is the electrical spin-transfer torque associated with electron-mediated spin currents; however, this suffers from substantial energy dissipation caused by Joule heating. We experimentally demonstrated an alternative approach based on magnon currents and achieved magnon-torque-induced magnetization switching in BiSe/antiferromagnetic insulator NiO/ferromagnet devices at room temperature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the Gilbert damping parameter α for rare earth (RE)-transition metal (TM) ferrimagnets over a wide temperature range. Extracted from the field-driven magnetic domain-wall mobility, α was as low as the order of 10^{-3} and was almost constant across the angular momentum compensation temperature T_{A}, starkly contrasting previous predictions that α should diverge at T_{A} due to a vanishing total angular momentum. Thus, magnetic damping of RE-TM ferrimagnets is not related to the total angular momentum but is dominated by electron scattering at the Fermi level where the TM has a dominant damping role.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the presence of a magnetic field, the flow of charged particles in a conductor is deflected from the direction of the applied force, which gives rise to the ordinary Hall effect. Analogously, moving skyrmions with non-zero topological charges and finite fictitious magnetic fields exhibit the skyrmion Hall effect, which is detrimental for applications such as skyrmion racetrack memory. It was predicted that the skyrmion Hall effect vanishes for antiferromagnetic skyrmions because their fictitious magnetic field, proportional to net spin density, is zero.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe information carrier of modern technologies is the electron charge whose transport inevitably generates Joule heating. Spin-waves, the collective precessional motion of electron spins, do not involve moving charges and thus avoid Joule heating [1-3]. In this respect, magnonic devices in which the information is carried by spin-waves attract interest for low-power computing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntiferromagnetic spintronics is an emerging research field which aims to utilize antiferromagnets as core elements in spintronic devices. A central motivation towards this direction is that antiferromagnetic spin dynamics is expected to be much faster than its ferromagnetic counterpart. Recent theories indeed predicted faster dynamics of antiferromagnetic domain walls (DWs) than ferromagnetic DWs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe theoretically investigate the dynamics of antiferromagnetic domain walls driven by spin-orbit torques in antiferromagnet-heavy-metal bilayers. We show that spin-orbit torques drive antiferromagnetic domain walls much faster than ferromagnetic domain walls. As the domain wall velocity approaches the maximum spin-wave group velocity, the domain wall undergoes Lorentz contraction and emits spin waves in the terahertz frequency range.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF