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A reconfigurable waveguide for energy-efficient transmission and local manipulation of information in a nanomagnetic device

Nature Nanotechnology volume 11, pages 437–443 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Spin-wave-based devices promise to usher in an era of low-power computing where information is carried by the precession of the electrons' spin instead of dissipative translation of their charge. This potential is, however, undermined by the need for a bias magnetic field, which must remain powered on to maintain an anisotropic device characteristic. Here, we propose a reconfigurable waveguide design that can transmit and locally manipulate spin waves without the need for any external bias field once initialized. We experimentally demonstrate the transmission of spin waves in straight as well as curved waveguides without a bias field, which has been elusive so far. Furthermore, we experimentally show a binary gating of the spin-wave signal by controlled switching of the magnetization, locally, in the waveguide. The results have potential implications in high-density integration and energy-efficient operation of nanomagnetic devices at room temperature.

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Figure 1: Schematic of the experiment and operation principle.
Figure 2: SW transport in a straight waveguide.
Figure 3: Channelling SWs at an angle.
Figure 4: Gating of SW propagation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation, the Prime Minister's Office, Singapore, under its Competitive Research Programme (CRP award no. NRF-CRP 10-2012-03), SMF-NUS New Horizon Awards and Ministry of Education, Singapore AcRF Tier 2 grant (no. R-263-000-A19-112). A.O.A. is a member of the Singapore Spintronics Consortium (SG-SPIN).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117576, Singapore

    Arabinda Haldar, Dheeraj Kumar & Adekunle Olusola Adeyeye

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  1. Arabinda Haldar
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  2. Dheeraj Kumar
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Contributions

A.H. and A.O.A. conceived the project. A.H. fabricated the samples and carried out the experiments. D.K. performed the micromagnetic simulations. A.O.A. supervised the overall project. All authors discussed the results and co-wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Adekunle Olusola Adeyeye.

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Haldar, A., Kumar, D. & Adeyeye, A. A reconfigurable waveguide for energy-efficient transmission and local manipulation of information in a nanomagnetic device. Nature Nanotech 11, 437–443 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2015.332

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