Spintronics Phenomena in Magnetic Nanostructures

Spintronics merges the electron’s charge and spin degrees of freedom to achieve novel functionalities in memory, logic and sensing devices. At the nanoscale, tailored magnetic heterostructures exploit spin currents, spin–orbit torques and magnetoresistive effects to manipulate and detect spin configurations with high efficiency. In thin films and multilayers, the interplay between exchange interactions, magnetic anisotropy and spin–orbit coupling gives rise to chiral spin textures such as skyrmions, spin spirals and domain walls with Néel or Bloch character. These textures can be nucleated, driven by spin torques or magnetic fields, and read out via magnetotransport or advanced imaging techniques. Recent advances have extended the real-space and depth-resolved characterisation of three-dimensional spin structures and deepened our understanding of topological properties such as winding number. By engineering interfaces and exploiting interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions, it is now possible to stabilise and control exotic spin excitations at room temperature, offering pathways to low-power, high-density information technologies.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have combined X-ray resonant magnetic scattering with micromagnetic modelling to resolve hybrid domain wall configurations in magnetic multilayers, mapping the vertical distribution of Néel and Bloch components and enabling quantitative calibration of out-of-plane magnetisation profiles. Nitrogen-vacancy centre magnetometry under ambient conditions has been utilised to reconstruct the full three-dimensional spin texture of room-temperature skyrmions in multilayer stacks, revealing a rotation of chirality through the film thickness and highlighting the role of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions in skyrmion stability. First-principles calculations and spin dynamics simulations have demonstrated how multilayer engineering of 4d/Fe/5d interfaces allows independent tuning of Heisenberg exchange and Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions, leading to the prediction and subsequent observation of skyrmions with tailored size and robustness in transition-metal multilayers.

Spintronics Phenomena in Magnetic Nanostructures publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in spintronics phenomena in magnetic nanostructures across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Spintronics: The field exploiting the spin degree of freedom of electrons, alongside charge, to achieve novel device functionalities.

Magnetic anisotropy: The directional dependence of a material’s magnetic energy that favours alignment of spins along certain crystallographic axes.

Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction: An antisymmetric exchange interaction arising from spin–orbit coupling in noncentrosymmetric environments, stabilising chiral spin textures.

Skyrmion: A topologically protected, vortex-like arrangement of spins characterised by an integer winding number.

Domain wall: The boundary region separating magnetic domains with different magnetisation directions, which can adopt Néel or Bloch configurations.

Spin texture: The spatial arrangement and orientation of magnetic moments within a material.

Topological winding number: An integer quantifying the total rotation of spins in a closed spin texture, indicating its topological protection.

Phason mode: A low-energy excitation corresponding to the rigid translation of an incommensurate spin density wave or spiral.

References

1. Probing of three-dimensional spin textures in multilayers by field dependent X-ray resonant magnetic scattering. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Magnetostatic twists in room-temperature skyrmions explored by nitrogen-vacancy center spin texture reconstruction. Nature Communications (2018).
3. Engineering skyrmions in transition-metal multilayers for spintronics. Nature Communications (2016).
4. Phase Coexistence of Mn Trimer Clusters and Antiferromagnetic Mn Islands on Ir(111). ACS Nano (2024).
5. Observation of the sliding phason mode of the incommensurate magnetic texture in Fe/Ir(111). npj Quantum Materials (2024).
6. Machine-learning recognition of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction from magnetometry. Physical Review Research (2023).