Computers and other electronic devices rely on a flowing electric charge to store and process information. As computing demands increase, that approach is running up against limits in heat generation, power consumption, and device scaling. One way researchers are addressing these constraints is through spintronics, which uses not only an electron’s charge but also its spin. Controlling spin could enable faster switching, lower energy use, and new ways to integrate memory and logic within a single device.
Recent work from Northwestern Engineering’s James Rondinelli identifies a new class of multiferroic materials that could help make that vision practical.
The study focuses on ternary nitride compounds that combine several properties that are rarely found together, including ferroelectricity, magnetism, and non-relativistic spin splitting. These combined characteristics suggest a pathway to electronic components that are faster, smaller, and more energy efficient than current technologies.
Magnetoelectric and spintronic devices based on such materials could retain information without constant power, switch states rapidly, and generate less heat—advantages that matter for applications ranging from data centers to personal electronics.
The result could be new forms of memory, storage, and other components suited for quantum and high-performance computing.
“Ferroelectricity and magnetism rarely coexist in a single material, and when they do, the cross-coupling between them becomes a design lever,” Rondinelli said. “Our ultimate goal is to use those levers to write and read spin states with voltage pulses to slash the energy cost of a switching event by orders of magnitude compared to conventional transistors.”
Rondinelli is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and leads the Materials Theory and Design group. He presented the work in the paper “Ferroelectricity in Antiferromagnetic Wurtzite Nitrides,” published April 24 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.