Magnetic materials and devices play a tremendous role in information technology and are a key tool to meet many current societal challenges. They might enable the exploration of the human brain with non-invasive sensors and IT devices with low environmental impact. Antiferromagnetic materials are magnetic materials with alternating orientation of the atomic magnetic moments, having thus a zero net stray magnetic field. This is different from ferromagnetic materials like fridge magnets. Antiferromagnetic spintronics is considered as a disruptive approach, enabling efficient spintronic devices, potentially replacing silicon-based microelectronics components in the future. Louis Néel received in 1970 the Nobel prize in Physics for his studies on antiferromagnetic materials, describing them as “interesting but useless”, which was believed at the time. Today we know that ultimate stability and speed indicate significant untapped potential of this class of materials, where information can be stored in the antiferromagnetic magnetic moment orientation. In antiferromagnetic insulators information can be transported by spin currents without Joule heating, thus being promising for applications where low power dissipation is important. We thus investigated spin switching and transport primarily in particularly low damping insulating antiferromagnetic materials. Our key goals have been (i) To develop and employ an all-electrical read-out and control of the antiferromagnetic magnetic moments, potentially paving the way to store magnetic information in this class of materials. (ii) To achieve and study long distance spin current transport in antiferromagnets, potentially enabling information transport with low dissipation.
