One of the latest technologies for digitally encoding information is spin orbitronics, which not only exploits the charge of the electron (electronics) and its spin (spintronics), but also the interaction of the spin with its orbital motion, offering a multitude of properties.
This technology is applied in certain materials to generate magnetic configurations that are very stable but which can be controlled and moved quickly with very small electrical currents. The resulting structures are considered very promising for future spin-orbitronic devices, as they provide high processing speed and a high capacity for storing data, with low energy consumption.
The European team led by the IMDEA Nanociencia Institute has developed a methodology to prepare such a system. It consists of a device made of stacked graphene films placed on ferromagnetic cobalt, arranged in turn on a platinum layer with a certain crystallographic orientation. The details are published in Nano Letters.
The main author of the study, Paolo Perna from IMDEA Nanociencia, explains the advantages of this configuration: "On the one hand, the exceptional properties of graphene make it possible to obtain a homogeneous, flat and protected magnetic layer, which is also atomically perfect. However, what matters most are the two magnetic properties that are achieved: an improvement in the magnetic anisotropy of cobalt (its spines are preferably oriented in a certain direction), and a strong interaction called Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya, which allows the presence of chiral magnetic structures, as they do not overlap with its specular image."
These chiral magnetic structures of nanometric size are called skyrmions. They are very stable and act as carriers of binary information as they travel through graphene.