Quantum Materials for Future Technologies: from Superconductivity to Magnetic Vortices

Abstract:

One of the key issues of today’s wireless communication society is to improve information flow as well as storage. Currently established devices based on the detection and movements of electron charges are reaching their limits in terms of performance. Further and even more importantly, improving the energy efficiency of such devices has become a significant concern in the critical quest towards a sustainable future. Here the group of so-called quantum materials has become the center of attention for a wide scientific community. In the search for future data storage technologies, superconductivity and magnetic vortex structures called skyrmions have raised great interest. Superconductivity is a property of certain materials to lose resistance at low temperatures, which allows electrical currents to pass through without losing energy. Superconducting computers have the potential to improve the energy efficiency of the cloud. Magnetic skyrmions are nanometer-size objects with non-trivial spin structures that can be moved using low current density. These properties make skyrmions ideal candidates for achieving high storage density, high data transfer rate, and low power consumption. Materials exhibiting such phenomena could therefore initiate a completely new generation of spintronics/quantum devices. To fully exploit their unique properties in devices, a fundamental understanding of the electronic/magnetic excitations and quantum entanglements is required. In this talk, an overview of the field will be introduced and results on a specific material are presented.