A team led by Madhab Neupane, a professor of physics at UCF, has identified a promising candidate material for future computing that could use electron spin rather than electrical charge. The researchers found evidence of altermagnetism in Co₁/₄TaSe₂, a layered material containing magnetic cobalt atoms.
Altermagnetism is described as combining useful traits of the two more familiar forms of magnetism. Ferromagnets, the kind most people associate with everyday magnets, have magnetic moments that align in the same direction and create a magnetic field, but stray fields can interfere with nearby components. Antiferromagnets have moments that point in opposing directions and cancel out, largely avoiding stray fields, yet they lack some electronic properties found in ferromagnets. Altermagnets can avoid unwanted stray fields while also generating and detecting spin currents, the movement of electron spins through a material.
To test the material, the researchers used angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, or ARPES, which measures the energy and movement of electrons and maps a material's electronic structure. They first detected a characteristic splitting in the material's electronic bands, then used spin-resolved ARPES and found the split states carried opposite spin polarizations. Because photoemission measurements are highly sensitive to surfaces, the team screened samples produced by collaborators for ultra-clean surfaces. Measurements were performed at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. Neupane said the significance became clear once experimental measurements consistently matched theoretical predictions, and that seeing independent pieces of evidence converge gave the team confidence it had identified a genuine layered altermagnet.
Press release issued by UCF Today:
https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-researcher-discovers-experimental-evidence-of-new-type-of-magnetism/
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