All-electrical switching of a topological non-collinear antiferromagnet at room temperature

Yongcheng Deng; Xionghua Liu; Yiyuan Chen; Zongzheng Du; Nai Jiang; Chao Shen; Enze Zhang; Houzhi Zheng; Hai-Zhou Lu; Kaiyou Wang

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwac154

All-electrical switching of a topological non-collinear antiferromagnet at room temperature

Natl Sci Rev. 2022 Aug 4;10(2):nwac154. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwac154. eCollection 2023 Feb.

Authors

Yongcheng Deng^{1

2}, Xionghua Liu^{1

2}, Yiyuan Chen^{3

4}, Zongzheng Du^{3

4}, Nai Jiang^{1

2}, Chao Shen^{1

2}, Enze Zhang^{1

2}, Houzhi Zheng^{1

2}, Hai-Zhou Lu^{3

4}, Kaiyou Wang^{1

2

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory for Superlattices and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.
² Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
³ Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering and Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen 518055, China.
⁴ International Quantum Academy, Shenzhen 518048, China.
⁵ Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, Beijing 100193, China.
⁶ Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.

Abstract

Non-collinear antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetals, combining the advantages of a zero stray field and ultrafast spin dynamics, as well as a large anomalous Hall effect and the chiral anomaly of Weyl fermions, have attracted extensive interest. However, the all-electrical control of such systems at room temperature, a crucial step toward practical application, has not been reported. Here, using a small writing current density of around 5 × 10⁶ A·cm^-2, we realize the all-electrical current-induced deterministic switching of the non-collinear antiferromagnet Mn₃Sn, with a strong readout signal at room temperature in the Si/SiO₂/Mn₃Sn/AlO_x structure, and without external magnetic field or injected spin current. Our simulations reveal that the switching originates from the current-induced intrinsic non-collinear spin-orbit torques in Mn₃Sn itself. Our findings pave the way for the development of topological antiferromagnetic spintronics.

Keywords: all-electrical switching; non-collinear antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetals; spin-orbit torques; spintronics.