Recently, Professor Lingling Tao's research group from the School of Physics made significant progress in antiferromagnetic spintronics. Their findings, titled

Recently, Professor Lingling Tao's research group from the School of Physics made significant progress in antiferromagnetic spintronics. Their findings, titled Layer Hall Detection of the Néel Vector in Centrosymmetric Magnetoelectric Antiferromagnets, were published in Physical Review Letters. This work proposes a novel electric mean?to detect the Néel vector in magnetoelectric antiferromagnets and paves the way for the design of magnetoelectric antiferromagnetic spintronic devices.

Magnetoelectric antiferromagnets are a special class of antiferromagnetic materials characterized by symmetry-protected macroscopic surface magnetization and the Néel vector is magnetoelectric controllable. Magnetoelectric antiferromagnets have promising applications in antiferromagnetic spintronic devices. In this regard, the efficient detection of the Néel vector becomes one of the basic principles enabling such device design.

To address this challenge, the research team proposed a layer Hall detection of the surface magnetization, which allows for the detection of the Néel vector indirectly. They systematically summarized all magnetic point groups sustaining the layer Hall effect based on the symmetry analysis. Based on density functional theory calculations,?they confirmed that magnetoelectric antiferromagnets exhibit a sizable?layer Hall effect under an electric field. This work suggests that the layer Hall effect represents an efficient way to detect the Néel?vector in magnetoelectric antiferromagnets.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.096803