Ab initio calculations of laser and transport induced magnetization
Title: Ab initio calculations of laser and transport induced magnetization
DNr: SNIC 2018/3-259
Project Type: SNIC Medium Compute
Principal Investigator: Marco Berritta <M.Berritta@exeter.ac.uk>
Affiliation: Uppsala universitet
Duration: 2018-05-31 – 2019-06-01
Classification: 10304
Keywords:

Abstract

Spintronics, consisting in the study of the electrons’ spins in solid-state systems, is a steadily growing field. The present research will explore, in the context of spintronics, the dynamics of the spin degree of freedom in materials from a quantitative point of view and, how this dynamics can be manipulated applying electric and electromagnetic fields to the materials. The ultimate goal will be to define control protocols for efficient spin manipulation. The research performed with the requested computational resources will consist in implementing, when not existing, and extend, when existing, ab initio tools for calculating the strength of individual phenomena occurring when a material interacts with static or dynamic electromagnetic fields, with particular focus to the Edelstein effect and the spin Hall effect for which a material, when perturbed with an electric field, can develop magnetization or magnetic currents, and the inverse Faraday effect, consisting in the appearance of an induced magnetization in a material when perturbed with circularly polarized light. The intensive application of these methods will allow to find the best materials for spintronics applications and find material-specific strategy for optimally control their magnetization. Initially the main system that will be investigated will be bulk ferromagnets, antiferromagnets, paramagnets and ferrimagnets with particular focus on materials which turn out to be promising for memory devices design. For example, in the case of inverse Faraday effect, rare earth ferrimagnets and ferromagnets with high magnetic anisotropy. In the case of the spin Hall effect we will extensively study several metallic materials and several antiferromagnets. The Edelstein effect will be investigated intensively on systems with broken inversion symmetry and antiferromagnets. At the same time these three effects will be investigated also in Weyl semimetals and Weyl antiferromagnets with particular focus on the edge states of these materials. For this latter task large scale calculations on slabs (that require a big amount of computational resources) will be performed.