High speed spintronics from MHz to THz

In today’s vision to improve technologies for electronic devices further, a physical limit is appearing to Moore’s law, the trend in the last 50 years to double the number of transistors on a chip. This physical limit, due to source-to-drain leakage and other material limits, prevents the shrinking of even more transistors and forces us to search for new approaches to improve device properties. Spintronics is one of them and deals with the magnetic moment of the electron called spin, in addition to the charge which is used in “classical” electronics.

Various challenges and fields of research emerged in spintronics. For this Research Topic in Frontiers in Physics, we propose to study more specifically the dynamics of the magnetization and of the magnetic moment at higher frequencies, from MHz to THz. This range covers a wide band of phenomena, that, in addition to showing a very rich physics in which many things still need to be unveiled, might find their place in many applications and industrial fields in the upcoming years.

In this Research Topic, we welcome papers on the following topics:

- manipulation and control of spin waves as information carriers for future magnonic devices.

- spintronic oscillators using different phenomena, such as spin transfer torque (STT) or spin Hall effect (SHE), to induce oscillation of the magnetic moment.

- ultrafast spin dynamics, for which spintronics can play a role in both generating and detecting terahertz waves and, in reverse, terahertz pulses manipulating the spin dynamics of materials on ultrafast timescales, leading to various applications.

- magnetization dynamics in applied systems (such as magnetization reversal in MRAM or for targeting unconventional computing applications).

- dynamics of magnetic structures (such as magnetic vortices, domain walls, skyrmions, etc.)

- precession and nutation of the magnetization.

- any innovation in characterization techniques and/or experimental measurements for magnetic and spintronics systems and any advancement in materials, their growth, or characterization technique that would lead to progress for high-speed spintronics.