The innovation engine for new materials

Anti-Spintronics

Seminar Group: 

Speaker: 

Professor Allan MacDonald

Address: 

Department of Physics
University of Texas, Austin

Date: 

Friday, October 4, 2013 - 4:00pm

Location: 

Life Science Bldg., Room 1001

Host: 

Professor Susanne Stemmer

Because magnetism is a consequence of strong Coulomb interactions combined with Fermi statistics, it is stable at room temperature in many materials. It is mainly for this reason that it is the most widely applied collective electronic behavior. I will briefly review progress made over the past couple of decades in combining magnetism with electronics to create new kinds of valuable electronic devices and a new field in materials physics — spintronics. Spintronics is based primarily on the interesting properties of ferromagnetic metals. The second half of my talk will address the potential for incorporating antiferromagnetic conductors in the spintronics material palette, focusing on emerging understanding of the interplay between their electrical and magnetic properties. In will, in particular, point out that the antiferromagnetic intermetallic compound Mn3Ir, which is commonly used as an exchange-bias material in spintronic devices, has [1] a (as yet unmeasured) large anomalous Hall effect.