Scientists Unravel “Hall Effect” Physics Mystery



A physics puzzle is solved through the search for next-generation memory storage devices.

Antiferromagnetic materials are now being used more frequently in memory storage systems, according to an international team of experts.

Antiferromagnets are substances that have almost little external magnetic field but an internal magnetic field produced by electron spin. The data units, or bits, may be packed more tightly inside the material because there is no external (or "long-range") magnetic field, which could make them ideal for data storage.

The opposite is true of the ferromagnets typically used in magnetic memory devices. The bits in these devices do generate long-range magnetic fields that prohibit them from being too closely packed together since else they would interact.

The characteristic that is measured to read out an antiferromagnetic bit is the Hall effect, which is a voltage that emerges perpendicular to the applied current direction. When all of the antiferromagnet's spins are flipped, the Hall voltage changes sign. As a result, the Hall voltage has two signs, one of which corresponds to the fundamental binary coding unit used in all computer systems—a "1"—and the other to a "0."

Although the Hall effect in ferromagnetic materials has been known for a long time, researchers have only lately become aware of and have a limited understanding of the impact in antiferromagnets.

Using a Weyl antiferromagnet (Mn3Sn), a substance with a particularly potent spontaneous Hall effect, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo in Japan, Cornell and Johns Hopkins Universities in the USA, and the University of Birmingham in the UK, have proposed an explanation for the "Hall effect."

Their findings, which were published in Nature Physics, have ramifications for both ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, as well as for future memory storage technologies as a whole.

Mn3Sn caught the attention of the researchers due to its imperfect antiferromagnetism and modest external magnetic field. The goal of the study was to determine whether this flimsy magnetic field was responsible for the Hall effect.

The University of Birmingham's Doctor Clifford Hicks, who is also a co-author of the study, created a device that the researchers used in their experiment. The apparatus may be used to subject the material being tested to varying degrees of stress. The researchers found that the residual external magnetic field rose when they applied this stress to this Weyl antiferromagnet.

The voltage across the material would change if the magnetic field were what was causing the Hall effect.

The scientists demonstrated that the voltage actually does not vary significantly, demonstrating that the magnetic field is not significant. Instead, they came to the conclusion that the Hall effect is caused by how spinning electrons are arranged within the material.

These experiments demonstrate that the quantum interactions between conduction electrons and their spins are what generate the Hall effect, according to Clifford Hicks, a co-author of the study from the University of Birmingham. The research is crucial for comprehending and developing magnetic memory technology.

By UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

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