Modeling of Chromium Oxide Non-Volatile and Secure Memory and Terahertz Oscillator

Shaloo Rakheja, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

July 30, 2021

Antiferromagnetic materials have ordered spin moments that alternate between individual atomic sites, which gives them a vanishing macroscopic magnetic signature and picosecond intrinsic timescale. These properties combined with emerging spintronic phenomena make antiferromagnets suitable for future technologies such as high-density, secure nonvolatile memory, compact narrowband terahertz sources, and spike generators.

Chromium oxide is an archetypal room-temperature antiferromagnetic insulator. Its domain state can be controlled by electric field in the presence of a small magnetic field from the linear magnetoelectric effect, and can be detected by measuring the anomalous Hall signal produced by stray moments on the surface. A steady-state spin precession can be excited from an in-plane electric current in a bilayer geometry consisting of a metal with strong spin-orbit coupling and chromium oxide, and can be detected from spin pumping. In this talk, I will present modeling and simulation of chromium oxide-based non-volatile memory and its hardware security implications. I will  briefly discuss the device modeling of chromium oxide terahertz oscillator and highlight the present challenges in the field of antiferromagnetic spintronics.