Recent progress in antiferromagnetic dynamics

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in antiferromagnetic spintronics, highlighting the microscopic understanding, dynamics of domain walls and skyrmions, and emerging quantum magnonics, emphasizing its potential for future information technologies.

Contribution

It unifies existing theories of antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic dynamics and surveys recent progress, including open problems and the development of quantum magnonics.

Findings

Unified equations for antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic dynamics

Progress in antiferromagnetic domain wall and skyrmion motion

Development of antiferromagnetic quantum magnonics

Abstract

Spintronics, since its inception, has mainly focused on ferromagnetic materials for manipulating the spin degree of freedom in addition to the charge degree of freedom, whereas much less attention has been paid to antiferromagnetic materials. Thanks to the advances of micro-nano-fabrication techniques and the electrical control of the N\'eel order parameter, antiferromagnetic spintronics is booming as a result of abundant room temperature materials, robustness against external fields and dipolar coupling, and rapid dynamics in the terahertz regime. For the purpose of applications of antiferromagnets, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the antiferromagnetic dynamics at the microscopic level. Here, we first review the general form of equations that govern both antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic dynamics. This general form unifies the previous theories in the literature. We also provide a survey for the recent progress related to antiferromagnetic dynamics, including the motion of antiferromagnetic domain walls and skyrmions, the spin pumping and quantum antiferromagnetic spintronics. In particular, open problems in several topics are outlined. Furthermore, we discuss the development of antiferromagnetic quantum magnonics and its potential integration with modern information science and technology.