Noncollinear Spintronics and Electric-Field Control: A Review

TL;DR

This review discusses noncollinear spin structures in spintronics, their exotic physical phenomena, and how electric-field control could enable ultralow power spintronic devices, highlighting recent advances and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of noncollinear spin structures, their associated phenomena, and the potential for electric-field manipulation in spintronics, which is a novel focus in the field.

Findings

Introduction of chiral and coplanar noncollinear spin structures

Summary of physical phenomena like topological Hall and Weyl fermions

Discussion on electric-field control enabling low-power devices

Abstract

Our world is composed of various materials with different structures, where spin structures have been playing a pivotal role in spintronic devices of the contemporary information technology. Apart from conventional collinear spin materials such as collinear ferromagnets and collinear antiferromagnetically coupled materials, noncollinear spintronic materials have emerged as hot spots of research attention owing to exotic physical phenomena. In this Review, we firstly introduce two types noncollinear spin structures, i.e., the chiral spin structure that yields real-space Berry phases and the coplanar noncollinear spin structure that could generate momentum-space Berry phases, and then move to relevant novel physical phenomena including topological Hall effect, anomalous Hall effect, multiferroic, Weyl fermions, spin-polarized current, and spin Hall effect without spin-orbit coupling in these noncollinear spin systems. Afterwards, we summarize and elaborate the electric-field control of the noncollinear spin structure and related physical effects, which could enable ultralow power spintronic devices in future. In the final outlook part, we emphasize the importance and possible routes for experimentally detecting the intriguing theoretically predicted spin-polarized current, verifying the spin Hall effect in the absence of spin-orbit coupling and exploring the anisotropic magnetoresistance and domain-wall-related magnetoresistance effects for noncollinear antiferromagnetic materials.