Spintronics in topological antiferromagnets

Antiferromagnetic materials are emerging as the future of spintronics because they combine numerous interesting, but not yet fully exploited features: large magneto-transport effects, robustness against magnetic perturbation, absence of stray fields and ultrafast Terahertz dynamics (whereas in ferromagnets, the frequency of resonance is in Gigahertz). In the race for low energy-consumption non-volatile devices, antiferromagnets are arising as disruptive materials that can entirely remodel the spintronics roadmap and paradigm. Concomitantly, the world is witnessing the outstanding rise and use of topological concepts in physics in general, in magnetism in particular, combined with the development of the field of spin-orbitronics. The present proposal aims at understanding important aspects in the magnetization dynamics as well as spin and charge transport in noncollinear topological antiferromagnetic system (such as the antiferromagnetic skyrmion or the 3Q antiferromagnetic structure) and explore their potential for electric manipulation and data storage. In this proposed research project, we seek to unravel the interplay between the nontrivial antiferromagnetic texture in real space and the electronic transport (the band structure E vs k is in momentum space) in a given two-dimensional material or interface. To deal with quantum transport in this type of coherent system, we will be using the well-known non-equilibrium Greens function methods implemented on real-space Hamiltonians. These methods allow the calculation of the transport quantities of interest using the wave function formulation of the scattering problem method as implemented in a software Kwant, which is a powerful Python package for numerical calculations on tight-binding models with a strong focus on quantum transport. We will complement the numerical aspect with some analytical derivation, within the framework of the linear response theory. These complementary methods have been proven to be very efficient in this type of problem