Events

The lecture entitled "Towards reliable measurements for spintronics: a case study" will be delivered by Dr Michaela Kuepferling (Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica, Torino, Italy).

Participation

• on-site: ACMiN (address: ul. Kawiory 30, building D-16, 2^nd floor, room 1.02A)
• online: MS Teams

Abstract

Spintronics is not only a low energy alternative to CMOS based electronics but opens up for new ways of thinking in computing, memory and logic technologies. The success story of spintronic sensors already revolutionized the magnetic field sensing market, and even more, led to unforeseen data storage densities for magnetic memories. Currently spintronic memories and sensors are commercially available, but spintronic devices are proposed also for logic-in-memory, bioinspired and probabilistic computing or THz generators and detectors, envisioning a strong impact on ICT, Internet-Of-Things and Computing.
Despite the large research effort on optimizing the performance and energy efficiency of spintronic devices, measurements of spintronic key parameters show contradictory results and the measurement reproducibility is scarce. Different measurement methods show disagreement, even on nominally the same device, and same measurement methods show data spread beyond the measurement uncertainty. This is partly due to the lack of established measurement practices. Clear guidelines for reliable measurements of spintronic key parameters and device performance are not available.
The seminar shows a case study in one of the fields in spintronics which has moved recently into worldwide focus, the study of chiral spin structures, promising for low energy novel memory or logic devices. The key parameter determining the stability of these structures is the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), an anisotropic exchange interaction between neighboring spins. In order to classify materials for their DMI, established techniques and protocols for an accurate measurement are indispensable. The seminar shows the current state-of-the art of measuring DMI, including uncertainty and reproducibility, and discusses ways to overcome the lack of measurement reliability.