Novel Antiferromagnets for Spintronic Devices

Spin electronic or spintronic devices which are used in hard disk drive (HDD) read heads are expected to replace the current silicon based transistor technology used in volatile memories. A prime example for the net advantage of employing spin rather than electric charge manipulation is found in the newly developed magnetic random access memory (MRAM) which is proposed as a replacement for the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) based on three terminal metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices. Besides the decrease of energy consumption by a factor three arising from manipulating electron angular momentum, the magnetic memories are non-volatile hence they do not require constant power to store information. This allows for additional energy saving due to data stability when the storage device is powered off.