News and Highlights
28 February 2022
28 February 2022
28 February 2022
28 February 2022
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.”
28 February 2022
27 September 2021
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.
15 July 2021
State-of-art data storage and memory are based on the property of ferromagnets (iron, nickel, cobalt) to be able to remember the direction of an external magnetic field, captured by the elementary magnetic building blocks called “spins” that are aligned parallel to each other.
14 July 2021
16 February 2021
Our growing demand for data information processing requires new technology to manipulate and control the state of magnetic materials on ever shorter timescales. An international research team from Delft, Nijmegen, Lancaster, Liège and Kiev has demonstrated that ultrashort pulses of light resonantly coupled to the vibrations of the crystal lattice (light-driven phonons) can be used to coherently switch between magnetic states within a time millions of times shorter than a blink of a human eye. Dr. Dima Afanasiev and Prof. Alexey Kimel from the Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM) of Radboud University contributed to the work: “It has long been known that magnetic properties are tightly linked to crystal lattice but one can barely imagine that light-driven phonons can have such a vivid and fast impact on the macroscopic state of magnet.”
16 February 2021