Electrical 180° switching of Néel vector in spin-splitting antiferromagnet
Lei Han, Xizhi Fu, Rui Peng, Xingkai Cheng, Jiankun Dai, Liangyang Liu, Yidian Li, Yichi Zhang, Wenxuan Zhu, Hua Bai, Yongjian Zhou, Shixuan Liang, Chong Chen, Qian Wang, Xianzhe Chen, Luyi Yang, Yang Zhang, Cheng Song, Junwei Liu, Feng Pan
Abstract
Antiferromagnetic spintronics have attracted wide attention due to its great potential in constructing ultradense and ultrafast antiferromagnetic memory that suits modern high-performance information technology. The electrical 180° switching of Néel vector is a long-term goal for developing electrical-controllable antiferromagnetic memory with opposite Néel vectors as binary “0” and “1.” However, the state-of-art antiferromagnetic switching mechanisms have long been limited for 90° or 120° switching of Néel vector, which unavoidably require multiple writing channels that contradict ultradense integration. Here, we propose a deterministic switching mechanism based on spin-orbit torque with asymmetric energy barrier and experimentally achieve electrical 180° switching of spin-splitting antiferromagnet Mn 5 Si 3 . Such a 180° switching is read out by the Néel vector–induced anomalous Hall effect. On the basis of our writing and readout methods, we fabricate an antiferromagnet device with electrical-controllable high- and low-resistance states that accomplishes robust write and read cycles. Besides fundamental advance, our work promotes practical spin-splitting antiferromagnetic devices based on spin-splitting antiferromagnet.