Low-energy switching of antiferromagnetic CuMnAs/GaP using sub-10 nanosecond current pulses

The recently discovered electrical-induced switching of antiferromagnetic (AF) materials that have spatial inversion asymmetry has enriched the field of spintronics immensely and opened the door for the concept of antiferromagnetic memory devices. CuMnAs is one promising AF material that exhibits such electrical switching ability and has been studied to switch using electrical pulses of length millisecond down to picosecond but with little focus on the nanosecond regime. We demonstrate here the switching of CuMnAs/GaP using nanosecond pulses. Our results showed that in the nanosecond regime, low-energy switching and a high readout signal with highly reproducible behavior down to a single pulse can be achieved. Moreover, a comparison of the two switching methods of orthogonal switching and polarity switching was made on the same device, and it showed distinct behaviors that can be exploited selectively for different future memory/processing applications.