SKDWONTRACK · Room temperature stabilization and all-electrical manipulation of chiral spin structures in metallic multilayers

Room temperature stabilization and all-electrical manipulation of chiral spin structures in metallic multilayers

The upcoming revolution in information technology driven by the internet-of-things, artificial intelligence and quantum computing will require a change in the way we generate, store and process information. On the one hand, the development of new systems with embedded intelligence and sensing devices (like in autonomous driving cars) will generate a massive increase in computation. This will not be feasible at current levels of devices’ power consumption, which calls for the design of more energy efficient technologies. While semiconductor microelectronics has reached its intrinsic limitations, spintronics offers a new path towards the design of memory and logic devices with high density and low power consumption. However, present spintronic devices such as magnetic-RAMs still suffer from high current density requirements. These drawbacks call for the development of new magnetic materials systems with intrinsically stable magnetic states, easy to manipulate and detect at a low energy cost. Metallic multilayers hosting non-collinear spin-structures such as magnetic skyrmions offer a highly promising solution. Their topological stability and outstanding transport properties make them a natural choice for the development of new memory and logic devices. On the other hand, in the last 15 years quantum computing moved from being a mere theoretical subject to a more applied one. Currently, there is a large interest in the discovery and development of new quantum materials which can be employed in the design of quantum computers. Non-collinear magnetic systems (e.g. skyrmionic systems) can play an important role in the development of new quantum materials. Indeed, the combination of superconducting materials and non-collinear magnetic systems can give access to what is called topological superconductivity, which is very interesting for the development of quantum computing systems. The main objective of the project was the design, investigation and engineering of new metallic multilayers hosting non-collinear and topologically protected magnetic states. Several different materials systems hosting non-collinear magnetism have been developed and studied. One main achievement of the action was the stabilization and the tuning of room-temperature magnetic skyrmions in the absence of any external magnetic field. This is key to the design of skyrmion-based electronic devices which are compatible with the miniaturization requirements of nanoelectronics.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз