自旋轨道转矩

Spin-orbit torque

信息磁存储技术在日常生活中,特别是目前的"大数据"时代,扮演着极其重要的角色。随着物理学的深入研究和发展,磁存储技术也发生着翻天覆地的变化。磁性随机存储器被视为未来磁存储技术的一颗新星,低功耗、读写快的特点使其拥有着巨大并且广泛的应用前景。磁存储技术很大程度上依赖于写入和读取磁存储单元信息的效率。近年来,基于自旋轨道耦合这一基本物理原理发展而来的自旋轨道转矩,由于能够有效地控制磁存储单元的磁矩,而受到了凝聚态物理和电子信息领域的广泛关注。涉及自旋轨道转矩的物理效应,如自旋轨道耦合、自旋霍尔效应、Edelstein效应等,都正在被全世界科学家深入地研究中。文章涵盖了近年来自旋轨道转矩领域的最新研究进展,重点介绍了重金属、二维材料体系、拓扑绝缘体以及反铁磁体系中的自旋轨道转矩。文章最后展望了自旋轨道转矩未来的发展方向及其潜在的工业应用价值。

Information storage technology plays a very important role in our daily lives, especially in the current ＂big data＂ age. Due to developments in physics, information storage technologies are in a golden era. As the new star of future information storage technology, mag- netic random access memories have attracted much attention due to their low power consumption and fast operation speed, thus they are believed to have a bright future. The central challenge is to read and write the information in a basic magnetic unit. Recently it has been shown that the spin-orbit torque, a result of the spin-orbit coupling, can manipulate the magnetization effectively, so this has generated great interest in the fields of both condensed matter physics and electronics. The basic physics is being investigated worldwide, including the phenomena of spin-orbit coupling, the spin Hall effect, and the Edelstein effect. This paper reviews recent important results regarding the spin orbit torque, focusing on heavy metals, two dimensional materials/inter- faces, topological insulators, and antiferromagnetic materials, At the end, future prospects and potential industrial applications are discussed.