Scientific Highlights

Scientists have used state-of-the-art 3D printing and microscopy to provide a new glimpse of what happens when taking magnets to three-dimensions on the nanoscale – 1000 times smaller than a human hair.

Artificial spin ices are periodic arrangements of interacting nanomagnets which allow investigating emergent phenomena in the presence of geometric frustration. Recently, it has been shown that artificial spin ices can be used as building blocks for creating functional materials, such as magnonic crystals. Scientists have now investigated the GHz dynamics in a spin ice with a chiral geometry. They found that the system possesses a rich spin-wave spectrum owing to the presence of anisotropic magnetostatic interactions. These results contribute to the understanding of GHz magnetization dynamics in spin ices and are relevant for the realization of reconfigurable magnonic crystals based on spin ices.

Chemical changes inside of breathable airborne particles can cause reactive oxygen species (ROS) and carbon centered radicals (CCRs) to form, which are harmful to our bodies and induce oxidative stress in lungs. Using X-ray spectromicroscopy at the PolLux beamline and mimicking the environmental and sunlit conditions aerosol particles experience in the atmosphere near the Earth Surface, it was recently found that highly viscous organic particles with low water content can attain high concentrations of ROS and CCRs that persist over long times. Natural particles like these will occur in ambient humidity below 60% and effectively trap ROS and CCRs inside that react when exposed to light.

Employing time-resolved STXM imaging, researchers investigated the emission of spin waves from a magnetic vortex core. By applying static magnetic fields, the control of both the shape of the vortex core and of the spatial profile of the emitted spin waves could be demonstrated, allowing for the fabrication of field-tunable spin wave focusing elements.

The first experimental observation of three-dimensional magnetic ‘vortex rings’ provides fundamental insight into intricate nanoscale structures inside bulk magnets, and offers fresh perspectives for magnetic devices.

Magnonic crystals are periodic magnetic structures, which are attracting great interest because of their potential use in low-power information technology based on spin waves, or magnons. Artificial spin ices have been recently studied as reconfigurable magnonic crystals, but achieving the required combination of magnetic state reconfigurability and desired magnon dispersions remains challenging. Here, researchers propose a hybrid system that makes use of a magnetic thin film underlayer to couple and strengthen the interaction between the artificial spin ice’s nanoelements though spin waves. Moreover, the magnetic state of the artificial spin ice gives rise to directional spin wave channels in the underlayer. This hybrid system opens a new direction for band structure engineering in reconfigurable magnonic crystals.

A collaboration of scientists from the ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute successfully demonstrated the all-electric operation of a magnetic domain-wall based NAND logic gate, paving the way towards the development of logic applications beyond the conventional metal-oxide semiconductor technology. The work has been published in the journal Nature.

In this work, published on the front cover page of Advanced Materials, an international collaboration of Italian, American, and Swiss scientists demonstrated a novel concept for the generation and manipulation of spin waves, paving the way towards the development of magnonic nano-processors.

Can a skyrmion-based device be used to read a handwritten text? In this work, an international scientist collaboration led by the Korea Institute of Technology and the IBM Watson research center could provide a first answer to this question by fabricating a proof-of-principle single-neuron artificial neural network, using X-ray magnetic microscopy at the Swiss Light Source to investigate its performances.