Pietro Gambardella: "Perspectives on classical and quantum spintronics"
Pietro Gambardella gave this lecture on the 16th of June of 2025, hosted by Can Onur Avci from the MULFOX group. Watch the video here.
Abstract
Spintronics is defined by the ability to control the flow of electric charges by magnetization, and vice versa. In heterostructures, spin and orbital currents mediate the transfer of nonequilibrium magnetic momenta between neighbouring materials. Decoupling these currents from charge flow enables electrical control of the magnetization in metals and insulators, as well as the manipulation of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic spin textures on short temporal and spatial scales. This talk will provide an overview of recent advances in spintronics that exploit charge-spin conversion phenomena, unravelling different ways to generate spin-orbital currents and demonstrating how they can be harnessed to drive domain wall motion, switch magnetic logic gates, and control magnetic tunnel junctions for nonvolatile random-access memory. Finally, I will discuss experiments that use spin torques to perform quantum operations on single spins in molecular tunnel junctions, exploring the potential of spin currents for quantum technologies.
