A team of engineers at the University of Delaware has discovered a novel way to link the magnetic and electric worlds of computing – a breakthrough that could one day enable computers to run faster and with far greater energy efficiency.
In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers from UD's Center for Hybrid, Active and Responsive Materials (CHARM), a National Science Foundation–funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, reveal that magnons – tiny magnetic waves that travel through materials – can generate measurable electric signals.
This finding could open the door to computer chips that integrate magnetic and electric components directly, eliminating the back-and-forth energy transfer that slows today's devices.
Unlike the flow of charged electrons, which encounter resistance and lose energy as heat, magnons carry information through the coordinated "spin" of electrons – tiny magnetic moments that can be thought of as waves traveling through a material. The UD team's theoretical models show that when these magnetic waves move through antiferromagnetic materials, they can create electric polarization – essentially producing a detectable voltage.
Because antiferromagnetic magnons can travel at terahertz frequencies – roughly a thousand times faster than those in standard magnets – the discovery also offers a potential pathway toward ultrafast, low-power computing. The UD team is now working to experimentally confirm their predictions and explore how magnons interact with light, which could provide an even more efficient way to control them.
This research is part of CHARM's broader mission to design hybrid quantum materials for advanced technologies.
Co-authors include Federico Garcia-Gaitan, Yafei Ren, M. Benjamin Jungfleisch, John Q. Xiao, Branislav K. Nikolić, Joshua Zide, and Garnett W. Bryant (NIST/University of Maryland). The work was supported by the National Science Foundation under award DMR-2011824.
