Ferroelectric switching of spin-to-charge conversion for ultralow power spintronics

CIC nanoGUNE Seminars

Speaker

Dr. Christian Rinaldi, Associate Professor Politecnico di Milano

When

2023/03/13
12:00

Place

nanoGUNE seminar room, Tolosa Hiribidea 76, Donostia - San Sebastian

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**Ferroelectric switching of spin-to-charge conversion for ultralow power spintronics** Christian Rinaldi [christian.rinaldi@polimi.it](mailto:christian.rinaldi@polimi.it) Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Information and communication technology is going to use 20% of the global electricity production by 2030. Architectures far beyond the well-established CMOS platform are required for electronics to switch greener. A remarkable pathway was indicated by Intel in the work titled “Beyond CMOS computing with spin and polarization” [1, 2], where the combination of ferroics and spin currents was shown to be a master choice for attojoule-class logic devices. Ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors (FERSC) [3] such as germanium telluride (GeTe) [4] emerge in this scenario, thanks to their intrinsic combination of ferroelectricity and electric controllability of spin currents in single materials. Here we demonstrate that the ferroelectric polarization of epitaxial thin films of GeTe can be reliably switched back and forth by electrical gating and used to effectively reverse a sizeable spin-to-charge conversion by spin Hall effect [5]. Doping and alloying with indium and tin will be shown as perspective to achieve control over conductivity and spin-to-charge conversion. Based on these results, we will show the possibility to develop scalable and energy-efficient non-volatile ferroelectric spin-orbit logic devices, in which information is conveniently stored in the ferroelectric state, while processing and read-out are enabled by polarization-dependent spin-to-charge conversion. Endowed of monolithic integrability with silicon, GeTe and its alloys may represent a viable path towards spintronic-based transistors with ultralow power consumption. * **References** * [1] S. Manipatruni, D. E. Nikonov and I. A. Young, “Beyond CMOS computing with spin and polarization”, Nature Physics 14, 338 (2018). * [2] Diogo C. Vaz et al., “Voltage-based magnetization switching and reading in magnetoelectric spin-orbit nanodevices”, ArXiv pre-print arXiv:2302.12162. * [3] S. Picozzi, “Ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors as a novel class of multifunctional materials”, Frontiers in Physics 2, 1 (2014). * [4] D. Di Sante, P. Barone, R. Bertacco and S. Picozzi, “Electric control of the giant Rashba effect in bulk GeTe”, Advanced Materials 25, 509 (2013). * [5] S. Varotto, C. Rinaldi et al., “Room-temperature ferroelectric switching of spin-to-charge conversion in germanium telluride”, Nature Electronics 4, 740 (2021). **Host:** L. Hueso & F. Casanova