Maniv Eran, Nair Nityan L, Haley Shannon C, Doyle Spencer, John Caolan, Cabrini Stefano, Maniv Ariel, Ramakrishna Sanath K, Tang Yun-Long, Ercius Peter, Ramesh Ramamoorthy, Tserkovnyak Yaroslav, Reyes Arneil P, Analytis James G
Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Sci Adv. 2021 Jan 8;7(2). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abd8452. Print 2021 Jan.
The theory behind the electrical switching of antiferromagnets is premised on the existence of a well-defined broken symmetry state that can be rotated to encode information. A spin glass is, in many ways, the antithesis of this state, characterized by an ergodic landscape of nearly degenerate magnetic configurations, choosing to freeze into a distribution of these in a manner that is seemingly bereft of information. Here, we show that the coexistence of spin glass and antiferromagnetic order allows a novel mechanism to facilitate the switching of the antiferromagnet FeNbS, rooted in the electrically stimulated collective winding of the spin glass. The local texture of the spin glass opens an anisotropic channel of interaction that can be used to rotate the equilibrium orientation of the antiferromagnetic state. Manipulating antiferromagnetic spin textures using a spin glass' collective dynamics opens the field of antiferromagnetic spintronics to new material platforms with complex magnetic textures.
反铁磁体电开关背后的理论基于一种明确的破缺对称态的存在，该状态可以旋转以编码信息。在许多方面，自旋玻璃与这种状态相反，其特征是具有几乎简并的磁构型的遍历能谱，它会以一种看似缺乏信息的方式冻结成这些构型的分布。在此，我们表明自旋玻璃与反铁磁序的共存允许一种新颖的机制来促进反铁磁体FeNbS的开关，该机制源于自旋玻璃的电激发集体缠绕。自旋玻璃的局部纹理打开了一个各向异性的相互作用通道，可用于旋转反铁磁态的平衡取向。利用自旋玻璃的集体动力学来操纵反铁磁自旋纹理，为具有复杂磁纹理的新材料平台开启了反铁磁自旋电子学领域。
