Information transport with magnetic momentum

A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim has discovered an exciting method for controlling spin carried by quantized spin wave excitations in antiferromagnetic insulators.

Elementary particles carry an intrinsic angular momentum known as their spin. For an electron, the spin can take only two particular values relative to a quantization axis, letting us denote them as spin-up and spin-down electrons. This intrinsic two-valuedness of the electron spin is at the core of many fascinating effects in physics.

In today’s information technology, the spin of an electron and the associated magnetic momentum are exploited in applications of information storage and readout of magnetic media, like hard disks and magnetic tapes.

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Source: “Information transport via magnons”, Technical University of Munich