Novel spin Hall effect materials and artificially engineered magnetic thin film heterostructures for energy-efficient spintronic memories

The discovery of novel materials with superior properties is a key factor to promote the progress of highly energy-efficient spintronic memories, which are urgently needed to satisfy the increasing demand for data storage. Of special interest are new materials that convert charge current into spin currents with high efficiency. These could impact two distinct classes of spintronic memories, namely magnetoresistive random-access memories (MRAMs), that are already in mass production, and racetrack memories that have great potential for high density and high performance, non-volatile memory-storage devices. For the latter chiral non-collinear spin textures such as domain walls and skyrmions are the basic storage elements. I will detailedly introduce our work about energy efficient racetrack memories, which is going to be put industrial application in a visible time point and our findings about magnetic bubbles and Néel skyrmions in intermetallic thin films.