Antiferromagnetic spintronics

TL;DR

Antiferromagnetic spintronics explores the use of antiferromagnetic materials for advanced spintronic devices, leveraging their robustness, ultrafast dynamics, and large magneto-transport effects, with recent focus on spin-orbit interactions and theoretical-experimental insights.

Contribution

This review synthesizes current theoretical and experimental understanding of antiferromagnetic spintronic effects and highlights future research directions and challenges.

Findings

Antiferromagnetic materials exhibit promising spin transport properties.

Recent advances include the use of spin-orbit interactions for spin manipulation.

Identified bottlenecks and proposed future research avenues.

Abstract

Antiferromagnetic materials could represent the future of spintronic applications thanks to the numerous interesting features they combine: they are robust against perturbation due to magnetic fields, produce no stray fields, display ultrafast dynamics and are capable of generating large magneto-transport effects. Intense research efforts over the past decade have been invested in unraveling spin transport properties in antiferromagnetic materials. Whether spin transport can be used to drive the antiferromagnetic order and how subsequent variations can be detected are some of the thrilling challenges currently being addressed. Antiferromagnetic spintronics started out with studies on spin transfer, and has undergone a definite revival in the last few years with the publication of pioneering articles on the use of spin-orbit interactions in antiferromagnets. This paradigm shift offers possibilities for radically new concepts for spin manipulation in electronics. Central to these endeavors are the need for predictive models, relevant disruptive materials and new experimental designs. This paper reviews the most prominent spintronic effects described based on theoretical and experimental analysis of antiferromagnetic materials. It also details some of the remaining bottlenecks and suggests possible avenues for future research.