Electrical 180° switching of Néel vector in spin-splitting antiferromagnet

• Published in: Science advances 2024-01, Vol.10 (4), p.eadn0479
• Main Authors: Han, Lei, Fu, Xizhi, Peng, Rui, Cheng, Xingkai, Dai, Jiankun, Liu, Liangyang, Li, Yidian, Zhang, Yichi, Zhu, Wenxuan, Bai, Hua, Zhou, Yongjian, Liang, Shixuan, Chen, Chong, Wang, Qian, Chen, Xianzhe, Yang, Luyi, Zhang, Yang, Song, Cheng, Liu, Junwei, Pan, Feng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2375-2548; 2375-2548
• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn0479

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 Si . 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.