Abstract
The discovery of the spin Hall effect1 enabled the efficient generation and manipulation of the spin current. More recently, the magnetic spin Hall effect2,3 was observed in non-collinear antiferromagnets, where the spin conservation is broken due to the non-collinear spin configuration. This provides a unique opportunity to control the spin current and relevant device performance with controllable magnetization. Here, we report a magnetic spin Hall effect in a collinear antiferromagnet, Mn2Au. The spin currents are generated at two spin sublattices with broken spatial symmetry, and the antiparallel antiferromagnetic moments play an important role. Therefore, we term this effect the ‘antiferromagnetic spin Hall effect’. The out-of-plane spins from the antiferromagnetic spin Hall effect are favourable for the efficient switching of perpendicular magnetized devices, which is required for high-density applications. The antiferromagnetic spin Hall effect adds another twist to the atomic-level control of spin currents via the antiferromagnetic spin structure.
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Source data are provided with this paper. Any other data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for fruitful discussions with J. Yin, D. Weiss, J. Han, K. Cai, P. He, S. D. Pollard and R. Mishra. This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2017YFB0405704), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51871130), Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality (grant no. JQ20010) and National Key R&D Program of China (grants no. 2016YFA0203800 and 2017YFB0405604). X.R.W. is supported by Hong Kong RGC (grants no. 16301518 and 16301619).
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C.S. and X.C. designed the experiment. X.C., X.Z. and H.B. grew the thin films. X.C. and G.S. fabricated the devices. X.C., S.S., G.S., H.B. and H.Z. carried out the ST-FMR and MOKE measurements. X.C., X.Z. S.J., Y.Z. and Z.Z. performed the high magnetic field measurements. A.L., Y.C. and X.H. performed the structural characterizations. X.C., L.L., C.S., X.W., X.F. and D.X. proposed the theoretical model. H.W., H.Y. and F.P. gave suggestions on the experiments. C.S., H.Y. and F.P. supervised this study. All authors discussed the results and prepared the manuscript.
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Chen, X., Shi, S., Shi, G. et al. Observation of the antiferromagnetic spin Hall effect. Nat. Mater. 20, 800–804 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-00946-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-00946-z
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