Fast, high density and low power microelectronic devices are crucial enablers of today’s IT technology. With semiconductor devices facing severe limitations for their performance in the future, spintronics technologies have been recently identified as the most likely technology for the next generation of non-volatile random access memory. This is due to the fact that magnetic technologies are inherently non-volatile and thus retain their information without power. However, current spintronic approaches based on magnetic bits made of “single domain” spin structures or “domain walls” result in limited stability and an unacceptably high level of power consumption during operation due to the high currents and current densities required for manipulating the spins by spin transfer torque. Recently a radically new scientific and technological approach is necessary to tackle these key drawbacks, and obtain small and stable spin structures as well as new mechanisms to efficiently manipulate these. A key element in obtaining small and stable spin structures is known as the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). The DMI which arises in the presence of spin orbit coupling and inversion asymmetry leads to a non-collinear interaction resulting in a spin texture such as chiral domain walls and skyrmions. Along with the DMI in the presence of spin orbit coupling a mechanism to exploit these spin structures arises which is called the spin orbit torque (SOT).
These effects are intriguing for its possible high efficient manipulation and stabilization of spin structures for application memory applications. However, in order to manipulate and maximize these effects first we must understand the underlying mechanisms. The project has focused on understanding the underlying physics of DMI and SOT by studying these effects in various systems. By fully understanding the effects and being able to manipulate the effects in a manner to fully maximize the efficiency. This would lead to possible technologies for designing an ultra-efficient memory devices.
