Breaking of structural symmetries of nanomagnetic systems is of great interest for the development of ultralow-power spintronic devices. The structural asymmetry in various magnetic heterostructures has been engineered to reveal novel fundamental interactions between electric currents and magnetization, resulting in spin-orbit-torques (SOTs) on the magnetization [1][2][3][4][5][6] , which are both fundamentally important and technologically promising for device applications. Such SOTs have been used to realize current-induced magnetization switching [2][3][4]7 and domain-wall 3 motion [8][9][10] in recent experiments. Typical heterostructures exhibiting SOTs consist of a ferromagnet (F) with a heavy nonmagnetic metal (NM) having strong spin-orbit coupling on one side, and an insulator (I) on the other side (referred to as NM/F/I structures, shown schematically in Fig. 1a, which break mirror symmetry in the growth direction). In terms of device applications, the use of SOTs in NM/F/I structures allows for a significantly lower write current compared to regular spin-transfer-torque (STT) devices 4 . It can greatly improve energy efficiency and scalability [1][2][3][4][5]11 for new SOT-based devices such as magnetic random access memory (SOT-MRAM), going beyond state-of-the-art STT-MRAM.For practical applications, a critical requirement to achieve high-density SOT memory is the ability to perform SOT-induced switching without the use of external magnetic fields, in particular for perpendicularly-magnetized ferromagnets, which show better scalability and thermal stability as compared to the in-plane case 12 .However, there are currently no practical solutions that meet this requirement. In NM/F/I heterostructures studied so far, the form of the resultant current-induced SOT alone does not allow for deterministic switching of a perpendicular ferromagnet, requiring application of an additional external in-plane magnetic field to switch the perpendicular magnetization [2][3][4] . (This is a very general feature of SOT devices, which can be explained by symmetry-based arguments, as discussed below). In such experiments, the external field allows for each current direction to favor a particular orientation for the out-of-plane component of magnetization, thereby resulting in deterministic perpendicular switching. However, this external field is undesirable 4 from a practical point of view. For device applications, it also reduces the thermal stability of the perpendicular magnet by lowering the zero-current energy barrier between the stable perpendicular states, resulting in a shorter retention time if used for memory.This work provides a solution to eliminate the use of external magnetic fields, bringing SOT-based spintronic devices such as SOT-MRAM closer to practical application. We present a new NM/F/I structure, which provides a novel spin-orbit torque, resulting in zero-field current-induced switching of perpendicular magnetization. Our device consists of a stack of Ta/Co 20 Fe 60 B 20 /TaO x layers, but also has a...

Spintronics relies on the transport of spins, the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons, as an alternative to the transport of electron charge as in conventional electronics. The long-term goal of spintronics research is to develop spin-based, low-dissipation computing-technology devices. Recently, long-distance transport of a spin current was demonstrated across ferromagnetic insulators. However, antiferromagnetically ordered materials, the most common class of magnetic materials, have several crucial advantages over ferromagnetic systems for spintronics applications: antiferromagnets have no net magnetic moment, making them stable and impervious to external fields, and can be operated at terahertz-scale frequencies. Although the properties of antiferromagnets are desirable for spin transport, indirect observations of such transport indicate that spin transmission through antiferromagnets is limited to only a few nanometres. Here we demonstrate long-distance propagation of spin currents through a single crystal of the antiferromagnetic insulator haematite (α-FeO), the most common antiferromagnetic iron oxide, by exploiting the spin Hall effect for spin injection. We control the flow of spin current across a haematite-platinum interface-at which spins accumulate, generating the spin current-by tuning the antiferromagnetic resonance frequency using an external magnetic field. We find that this simple antiferromagnetic insulator conveys spin information parallel to the antiferromagnetic Néel order over distances of more than tens of micrometres. This mechanism transports spins as efficiently as the most promising complex ferromagnets. Our results pave the way to electrically tunable, ultrafast, low-power, antiferromagnetic-insulator-based spin-logic devices that operate without magnetic fields at room temperature.

We theoretically investigate spin transfer between a system of quasiequilibrated Bose-Einstein-condensed magnons in an insulator in direct contact with a conductor. While charge transfer is prohibited across the interface, spin transport arises from the exchange coupling between insulator and conductor spins. In a normal insulator phase, spin transport is governed solely by the presence of thermal and spin-diffusive gradients; the presence of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), meanwhile, gives rise to a temperature-independent condensate spin current. Depending on the thermodynamic bias of the system, spin may flow in either direction across the interface, engendering the possibility of a dynamical phase transition of magnons. We discuss the experimental feasibility of observing a BEC steady state (fomented by a spin Seebeck effect), which is contrasted to the more familiar spin-transfer-induced classical instabilities.

We investigate coupled spin and heat transport in easy-plane magnetic insulators. These materials display a continuous phase transition between normal and condensate states that is controlled by an external magnetic field. Using hydrodynamic equations supplemented by Gross-Pitaevski phenomenology and magnetoelectric circuit theory, we derive a two-fluid model to describe the dynamics of thermal and condensed magnons, and the appropriate boundary conditions in a hybrid normal-metal-magneticinsulator-normal-metal heterostructure. We discuss how the emergent spin superfluidity can be experimentally probed via a spin Seebeck effect measurement.

We demonstrate that we can determine the antiferromagnetic anisotropies and the bulk Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya fields of the insulating iron oxide hematite, α-Fe2O3, using a surface sensitive spin-Hall magnetoresistance (SMR) technique. We develop an analytical model that in combination with SMR measurements, allow for the identification of the material parameters of this prototypical antiferromagnet over a wide range of temperatures and magnetic field values. Using devices with different orientations, we demonstrate that the SMR response strongly depends on the direction of the charge current with respect to the magneto-crystalline anisotropies axis. We show that we can extract the anisotropies over a wide temperature range including across the Morin phase transition. We observe that the electrical response is dominated by the orientation of the antiferromagnetic Néel order parameter, rather than by the emergent weak magnetic moment. Our results highlight that the surface sensitivity of the SMR allows accessing the magnetic anisotropies of antiferromagnetic crystals and in particular thin films where other methods to determine anisotropies such as bulk-sensitive magnetic susceptibility measurements do not provide sufficient sensitivity.Antiferromagnets possess a number of intriguing and promising properties for electronic devices, which include a vanishing net moment and thus insensitivity to large magnetic fields [1] and a characteristic terahertz frequency dynamics [2]. However, antiferromagnets are challenging to probe. Since the pioneering work of Louis Néel [1], they have remained the subject of fundamental studies that have mainly relied on synchrotron based facilities for measurements [3]. In recent years, various new effects were discovered which enable more easy and efficient ways to probe and manipulate the antiferromagnetic (or Néel) vector by electrical current [4][5][6]. The Néel vector can be manipulated by electrical fields in magnetoelectric materials like Cr2O3 [7] or multiferroics like BiFeO3 [8], by bulk spin-galvanic effects in conducting antiferromagnets [9,10], or by interfacial spin-orbit torques in multilayers with the insulating NiO [11][12][13]. For magneto-transport measurements, effects that are even functions of the magnetic order parameter like anisotropic [14,15] and spin-Hall magnetoresistance (SMR) [16][17][18] could probe the antiferromagnetic state and detect switching events [11][12][13]. However, it is not obvious how one can extract the equilibrium state of an antiferromagnet and in particular determine from the field dependence of the SMR key magnetic properties such as the anisotropy values that are otherwise difficult to ascertain.The SMR technique can probe the magnetic state of bilayer systems consisting of a ferromagnetic or an antiferromagnetic insulator and a heavy metal. In the simple models [15,22,28], the longitudinal SMR signal ΔR is proportional to (1 − ( · µ) 2 ) for a ferromagnet, and (1 − ( · µ) 2 ) for an antiferromagnet (where the unit vector μ of spin-accumula...