On February 19, the reporter learned from the Southern University of Science and Technology that Liu Chang, associate professor of the Department of Physics, Liu Qihang, and Qiao Shan, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered a new class of magnetic materials through experiments - unconventional antiferromagnets. The discovery is expected to be an ideal next generation spintronics material, which will have an impact on fields such as high-density magnetic memory devices. The findings are in the journal Nature.

The reporter learned that this new type of material has the properties of anti-ferromagnet high stability, high-density information storage ability, ultra-fast spin mechanics, and so on, but also has the ability of ferromagnet to easily detect and manipulate the electronic spin state, and facilitate the realization of information reading and writing functions.

"Ferromagnets can attract small magnetic needles, whereas antiferromagnets cannot. These two magnetic materials seem to be very different, but the unconventional antiferromagnets we found are actually more like ferromagnets in a sense." Liu Qihang introduced.

It is reported that due to a novel symmetry between crystal atoms, unconventional antiferromagnets can be like ferromagnets, which the moving electrons are divided into two different parts of the "spin", manufacturing the most critical "spin flow" of spintronic devices, and the current international reputation of "staggered magnets" is one of them.

"The most direct way to observe these spin electrons is with an angle-resolved photoelectron spectrometer." "However, since the spin signal of unconventional antiferromagnets is relatively weak, the empirical process needs a large amount of system data support," Liu said.

"We have demonstrated this thanks to the latest electronic spin detector designed by Qiao Shan's team." Liu Chang said that the discovery of unconventional antiferromagnets represents the most important innovation in concept since the discovery of antiferromagnetism, and is expected to break through the current limits of spin transport devices in terms of information density and response speed, bringing a revolution in the field of spintronics and magnetic storage.

Source: Science and Technology Daily