Current-induced switching of a van der Waals ferromagnet at room temperature

Shivam N Kajale; Thanh Nguyen; Corson A Chao; David C Bono; Artittaya Boonkird; Mingda Li; Deblina Sarkar

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-45586-4

Current-induced switching of a van der Waals ferromagnet at room temperature

Nat Commun. 2024 Feb 19;15(1):1485. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45586-4.

Authors

Shivam N Kajale^#¹, Thanh Nguyen^#², Corson A Chao³, David C Bono³, Artittaya Boonkird², Mingda Li², Deblina Sarkar⁴

Affiliations

¹ MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
² Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁴ MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. deblina@mit.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Recent discovery of emergent magnetism in van der Waals magnetic materials (vdWMM) has broadened the material space for developing spintronic devices for energy-efficient computation. While there has been appreciable progress in vdWMM discovery, a solution for non-volatile, deterministic switching of vdWMMs at room temperature has been missing, limiting the prospects of their adoption into commercial spintronic devices. Here, we report the first demonstration of current-controlled non-volatile, deterministic magnetization switching in a vdW magnetic material at room temperature. We have achieved spin-orbit torque (SOT) switching of the PMA vdW ferromagnet Fe₃GaTe₂ using a Pt spin-Hall layer up to 320 K, with a threshold switching current density as low as [Formula: see text]1.69 [Formula: see text] 10⁶ A cm^-2 at room temperature. We have also quantitatively estimated the anti-damping-like SOT efficiency of our Fe₃GaTe₂/Pt bilayer system to be [Formula: see text], using the second harmonic Hall voltage measurement technique. These results mark a crucial step in making vdW magnetic materials a viable choice for the development of scalable, energy-efficient spintronic devices.