Thermoplasmonic Nanomagnetic Logic Gates

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how thermoplasmonic nanomagnetic logic gates can be reconfigured using local optical heating, enabling fast, energy-efficient, and reconfigurable in-memory computation controlled by laser pulses.

Contribution

It introduces a method to design reconfigurable nanomagnetic logic gates using local plasmon-assisted photo-heating, enhancing speed and flexibility over previous global heating approaches.

Findings

Reconfigurable logic gates achieved via optical control.

Potential operation speeds up to GHz.

Energy-efficient in-memory computation platform.

Abstract

Nanomagnetic logic, in which the outcome of a computation is embedded into the energy hierarchy of magnetostatically coupled nanomagnets, offers an attractive pathway to implement in-memory computation. This computational paradigm avoids separate energy costs associated with transporting and storing the outcome of a computational operation. Thermally-driven nanomagnetic logic gates, which are driven solely by the ambient thermal energy, hold great promise for energy-efficient operation, but have the disadvantage of slow operating speeds due to the lack of spatial selectivity of currently-employed global heating methods. As has been shown recently, this disadvantage can be removed by employing local plasmon-assisted photo-heating. Here, we show by means of micromagnetic and finite-elements simulations how such local heating can be exploited to design reconfigurable nanomagnetic Boolean logic gates. The reconfigurability of operation is achieved either by modifying the initialising field protocol or optically, by changing the order in which horizontally and vertically polarised laser pulses are applied. Our results thus demonstrate that nanomagnetic logic offers itself as a fast (up to GHz), energy-efficient and reconfigurable platform for in-memory computation that can be controlled via optical means.