News and Highlights

In our modern society, there is a continuous demand for innovative and sustainable electronic (data storage) devices. Nanotechnology allow electronics devices to be one hundred to ten thousand times smaller and faster. Nanoscale magnetic materials are exciting new developments in this field and future magnetic storage will depend on our fundamental knowledge of ultrafast magnetism. Significant in magnetism are antiferromagnets, as they contain unique properties. Recently, a team of researchers from Radboud University and Delft University has demonstrated a new technique to generate magnetic waves in antiferromagnets that propagate through the material at a speed much larger than the speed of sound. These so-called spin waves produce a lot less heat than conventional electric currents, making them promising candidates for future devices for information processing with significantly reduced power consumption. Professor Alexey Kimel, researcher within the Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM) of Radboud University contributed to the work. “I am very proud of these results showing the strength of IMM as a school. Three of my co-authors in this paper are our alumni. Ruben Leenders did his master in Nijmegen, Dmytro obtained here his PhD and Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy was here a postdoc.”

The ability of magnets to attract iron objects at a distance has fascinated people since ancient times. Only at the beginning of the 20th century physicists Pierre Weiss and Werner Heisenberg found an explanation for the phenomenon of ferromagnetism - the existence of a magnetically ordered state with a parallel arrangement of the magnetic moments of atoms below the critical temperature (Curie temperature). Soon the French physicist Louis Neel and the Soviet physicist Lev Landau suggested the existence of a fundamentally different class of magnetic materials - antiferromagnets, which, due to the antiparallel ordering of the magnetic moments of atoms, do not possess the properties of permanent magnets.