Abstract
The recently discovered electrical-induced switching of antiferromagnetic (AF) materials that have spatial inversion asymmetry has enriched the field of spintronics immensely and opened the door for the concept of antiferromagnetic memory devices. CuMnAs is one promising AF material that exhibits such electrical switching ability and has been studied to switch using electrical pulses of length millisecond down to picosecond but with little focus on the nanosecond regime. We demonstrate here the switching of CuMnAs/GaP using nanosecond pulses. Our results showed that in the nanosecond regime, low-energy switching and a high readout signal with highly reproducible behavior down to a single pulse can be achieved. Moreover, a comparison of the two switching methods of orthogonal switching and polarity switching was made on the same device, and it showed distinct behaviors that can be exploited selectively for different future memory/processing applications.
Highlights
Writing of magnetic information using spin-polarized currents, via current-induced spin transfer and spin-orbit torques, has been key to the development of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) technologies[1, 2]
Between each set of measurements, the number of pulses was increased by an additional pulse; such that the first set had a single 4 ns pulse for each switching attempt, and the tenth set had a train of 10 pulses
We demonstrated the ability of CuMnAs device to switch consistently and reliably using only one to ten current pulses of length 4 ns
Summary
Writing of magnetic information using spin-polarized currents, via current-induced spin transfer and spin-orbit torques, has been key to the development of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) technologies[1, 2]. Current-induced switching of AF materials relies on generation of a spin-orbit torque with the same handedness on each magnetic sublattice. Patterned CuMnAs devices have been shown as a proof-of-concept for a simple memory cell that can be integrated with existing CMOS technology[7] Another form of switching in CuMnAs was demonstrated, by reversing the polarity of a current pulse applied between a single pair of electrical contacts[9]. The resulting spin-orbit torque can cause motion of domain walls separating the two orthogonal domain populations, resulting in measurable changes of the AMR. This polarity-dependent switching method offers simpler device structures and potentially lower switching currents compared to the orthogonal switching method. Both switching methods of orthogonal switching that shows a slow decay of signal, and polarity switching method which shows a highly non-volatile switching behaviour, are explored on same device using our setup
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