Researchers Discover Experimental Evidence of New Type of Magnetism
hubie writes:
To build the ultrafast computers of the future, scientists are looking beyond the electrical charge of electrons to another property: their spin. While conventional hardware relies entirely on the movement of charge to process data, the ability to tap into this intrinsic quantum property could enable researchers to completely reinvent how information travels through a circuit.
Now, a team led by UCF Professor of Physics Madhab Neupane has identified a promising candidate. Neupane and his collaborators found evidence of altermagnetism, an emerging form of magnetism that combines useful characteristics of the two more familiar types of magnetism: ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.
Ferromagnetism produces the behavior most people associate with everyday magnets. In these materials, magnetic moments align in the same direction, creating a magnetic field. That property can be useful in electronics, but the resulting stray magnetic fields can interfere with nearby components.
Antiferromagnets behave differently. Their magnetic moments point in opposing directions and cancel one another out, largely avoiding the stray fields. However, they lack some of the useful electronic properties found in ferromagnets.
Altermagnets offer another possibility by combining desirable characteristics of both.
Like antiferromagnets, they can avoid producing unwanted stray magnetic fields. But they can also generate and detect spin currents - the movement of electron spins through a material - that researchers hope to use for future electronics.
Neupane and his collaborators experimentally identified signatures of this unusual magnetic state in Co/TaSe, a layered material containing magnetic cobalt atoms. The discovery gives researchers a promising, versatile platform for studying altermagnetism and could help advance future electronic and spintronic technologies.
"These materials are distinguished from more conventional antiferromagnets by their ability to generate and detect spin currents without the negative effect of producing stray fields," Neupane says. "This new property makes them very well positioned for use in many different applications - including spintronics, ultrafast memory devices, terahertz networks and energy-efficient electronics."
[...] Finding evidence of altermagnetism was only part of what made Co/TaSe interesting to researchers.
The material is built from extremely thin layers stacked on top of one another. Because those layers are weakly bound, scientists can separate and combine them into extremely thin structures, making layered materials promising for use in thin-film devices and other emerging technologies.
Scientists call this family of layered materials transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs.
[...] Most conventional electronics rely on the electrical charge of electrons to transmit and process information. But electrons possess another property, their spin, that researchers are exploring as another way to carry information.
This emerging field is known as spintronics.
Altermagnets could be particularly useful for spintronics because they can generate and detect spin currents without producing the stray magnetic fields that can interfere with densely packed electronic components.
"As electronic devices continue to shrink, researchers need new materials that can operate faster while consuming less energy," Neupane says.
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