Research

Modern computer hard drives based on giant- or tunneling-magnetoresistance effects have impressively demonstrated the great technological relevance of Spintronics devices. The key goal of Spintronics is to entangle the charge and spin degrees of freedom in a device to benefit from both their advantages at the same time, and control electrical current fully magnetically through the spin or, vice versa, manipulate the spin properties and store information therein solely through electrical currents.

Our Spintronics Research Group conducts fundamental theoretical research in this area with the aim to unravel possible knobs to control electron spins in realistic nanoscale systems. We focus in particular on heterostructures that consist of many different two-dimensional layers (e.g., graphene, transition-metal dichalcogenides, or van der Waals materials) stacked on top of each other. In that way, one can create a heterostructure that combines all favorable properties of the different individual layers, while typically providing additional tunability through electrical gating, doping, twisting, or proximitizing with magnetic or strong spin-orbit-coupling-inducing materials.

Moreover, we also investigate the spin and charge-transport characteristics of superconducting magnetic junctions (such as, e.g., Josephson junctions). While supercurrents in conventional superconductors are carried by Cooper pairs with net zero spin and therefore not really accessible to store information in the spin degree of freedom, certain spin-active components in the junction – such as spin-orbit coupling or nonuniform magnetization – have been predicted to convert these pairs into spin-polarized triplet pairs that can be harnessed to design Spintronics applications. We study the mechanisms behind this singlet-triplet pair conversion together with other fascinating phenomena in superconducting magnetic junctions like the recently intensively investigated supercurrent diode effect.