Antiferromagnetic switching driven by the collective dynamics of a coexisting spin glass

Eran Maniv; Nityan L Nair; Shannon C Haley; Spencer Doyle; Caolan John; Stefano Cabrini; Ariel Maniv; Sanath K Ramakrishna; Yun-Long Tang; Peter Ercius; Ramamoorthy Ramesh; Yaroslav Tserkovnyak; Arneil P Reyes; James G Analytis

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd8452

Antiferromagnetic switching driven by the collective dynamics of a coexisting spin glass

Sci Adv. 2021 Jan 8;7(2):eabd8452. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abd8452. Print 2021 Jan.

Authors

Eran Maniv^{1

2}, Nityan L Nair^{3

2}, Shannon C Haley^{3

2}, Spencer Doyle^{3

2}, Caolan John^{3

2}, Stefano Cabrini⁴, Ariel Maniv^{5

6}, Sanath K Ramakrishna⁶, Yun-Long Tang^{3

2

7}, Peter Ercius⁴, Ramamoorthy Ramesh^{3

2

7}, Yaroslav Tserkovnyak⁸, Arneil P Reyes⁶, James G Analytis^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. eranmaniv@berkeley.edu analytis@berkeley.edu.
² Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
³ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁴ Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁵ NRCN, P.O. Box 9001, Beer Sheva, 84190, Israel.
⁶ National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, FL 32310, USA.
⁷ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁸ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

Abstract

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 Fe_{1/3 + δ}NbS₂, 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.

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