Antiferromagnetic opto-spintronics: Part of a collection of reviews on antiferromagnetic spintronics

TL;DR

This review discusses how electromagnetic radiation can be used to control and detect spin order in antiferromagnets, highlighting their advantages and recent experimental approaches for spin manipulation and probing.

Contribution

It provides an overview of electromagnetic methods for probing and controlling antiferromagnetic order, emphasizing recent advances and future directions in antiferromagnetic spintronics.

Findings

Electromagnetic radiation enables probing of antiferromagnetic order.

Spin pumping and terahertz excitations are promising for control.

Future research will focus on spin manipulation and detection techniques.

Abstract

Control and detection of spin order in ferromagnets is the main principle allowing storing and reading of magnetic information in nowadays technology. The large class of antiferromagnets, on the other hand, is less utilized, despite its very appealing features for spintronics applications. For instance, the absence of net magnetization and stray fields eliminates crosstalk between neighbouring devices and the absence of a primary macroscopic magnetization makes spin manipulation in antiferromagnets inherently faster than in ferromagnets. However, control of spins in antiferromagnets requires exceedingly high magnetic fields, and antiferromagnetic order cannot be detected with conventional magnetometry. Here we provide an overview and illustrative examples of how electromagnetic radiation can be used for probing and modification of the magnetic order in antiferromagnets. Spin pumping from antiferromagnets, propagation of terahertz spin excitations, and tracing the reversal of the antiferromagnetic and ferroelectric order parameter in multiferroics are anticipated to be among the main topics defining the future of this field.