Featuring Assistant Professor Shaloo Rakheja, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract: Antiferromagnets (AFM) materials have ordered spin moments that alternate between individual atomic sites, which gives them a vanishing macroscopic magnetic signature and picosecond intrinsic timescale. In his 1970 Nobel Lecture, Louis Néel claimed that antiferromagnets are “extremely interesting from theoretical standpoint, but do not seem to have any applications.” Traditionally, AFM materials have played a secondary role to ferromagnets, which are used as active elements in commercial spintronic devices like magnetic sensors and non-volatile magnetic memory. However, it was recently suggested that spin transfer torque could in principle be used to manipulate the magnetic order in AFMs, leading to either stable AFM order precessions for their use as high-frequency oscillators, or switching of the AFM order for their use as magnetic memories.

My presentation will focus on recent theoretical and experimental developments in the field of spintronic devices using antiferromagnets as their active elements. I will specifically talk about two unique AFM materials, Cr₂O₃, a single-phase magnetoelectric material that can be manipulated solely with electric fields and the Weyl semi-metal Mn₃Sn in which spin torque can induce chiral spin rotations. Cr₂O₃-based ferromagnet-free random access memory has been experimentally demonstrated, while in the case of Mn₃Sn, spin torque driven dynamics were found to induce chiral oscillations, from the megahertz to the terahertz frequency range. These materials can overcome the central challenge of manipulating and reading the AFM’s order parameter via microelectronics compatible circuitry, thus allowing us to develop antiferromagnetic spintronics along a similar route as ferromagnetic spintronics.

I will conclude my talk by summarizing the limits, challenges, and opportunities of AFM spintronics for future technologies such as high-density, secure nonvolatile memory, compact narrowband terahertz sources, and spike generators.  

Bio: Shaloo Rakheja is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is leading the Center for Advanced Semiconductor Chips with Accelerated Performance (ASAP) – an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center, funded by the NSF, industry, and government and national labs. She is also the recipient of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiative Initiation (CRII) Award, as well as the NSF CAREER Award. Shaloo is an expert in physics-based modeling of nanoelectronic and magnetic devices for energy-efficient computing and communication. She has developed multi-scale models that enable materials-to-circuits co-design for a wide range of technologically relevant applications.

A boxed lunch will be served on a first come, first served basis.