New Horizons in Antiferromagnetic Spintronics: Exotic Ground States and Device Prospects

Dear Colleagues,

Antiferromagnetic materials, by virtue of their vanishing stray field and ultrafast dynamics, hold exceptional promise for next‐generation high performance spintronic devices. Nevertheless, the very feature that makes them attractive—zero net magnetization—also complicates the manipulation and detection of their spin states. Over the past decades, the discovery of various compensated spin textures, including non‐collinear antiferromagnets, skyrmion lattices, helical spin orders and altermagnets, has significantly enriched our understanding of fundamental spin and topological physics. The designed construction of these exotic ground states via techniques like magnetic intercalation, chemical substitution, epitaxial growth, and van der Waals heterostructure assembly, have, therefore, opened fresh avenues for both writing and reading spin information in antiferromagnetic systems.

This Special Issue aims to highlight recent advances in the design, understanding, and manipulation of novel antiferromagnetic orders. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Synthesis and characterizations of antiferromagnetic materials with nontrivial spin textures;
2. Modelling phase transition mechanisms and dynamic behaviours of exotic spin textures;
3. Transport phenomena arising from the antiferromagnetic ground states such as anomalous/spin Hall effects, magnetoelectric effects, thermospin effects, etc.;
4. Spin torque switching and ultrafast control of antiferromagnetic order;
5. Proof-of-concept spintronic devices based on antiferromagnetic materials;
6. Dynamics of synthetic antiferromagnetic spin textures;
7. Comparison between antiferromagnetic and altermagnetic material systems.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Pingfan Gu
Dr. Yuxuan Peng
Dr. Shiqi Yang
Guest Editors

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