UCLA

Ubiquitous smart devices and internet of things create tremendous data every day, shifting computing diagram towards data-driven. Computing and memory units in traditional computers are physically separated, which leads to huge energy cost and time delay. Novel computer architectures bring computing and memory units together for data-intensive applications. These memory units need to be fast, energy efficient, scalable and nonvolatile. This dissertation concerns innovating new types of magnetic memory or spintronic devices to achieve ultrahigh energy efficiency and ultracompact size from a perspective of material and heterostructure design. Especially, we employ quantum materials to enable potentially unprecedented technological advances. The highest energy efficiency of magnetic memory requires the largest charge-to-spin conversion efficiency that allows the minimum power to manipulate the magnetization. We utilize topological surface states of topological insulators (TIs), which have unique spin-momentum locking and thus are highly spin-polarized. We discover giant spin-orbit torques (SOTs) from TIs at room temperature, which are more than one order of magnitude larger than those of traditional heavy metals. We integrate TIs into room temperature magnetic memories, which promises future ultralow power dissipation. SOT characterization methods and related SOT studies on heavy metals, monolayer two-dimensional materials, and magnetic insulators-based heterostructures are discussed in detail. To have the best scaling performance, we investigate emerging topological skyrmions in magnetic thin films, which are arguably the smallest spin texture in nature. While most of the skyrmions are discovered in metallic systems, insulating skyrmions are desired thanks to their lower damping and thus potentially lower power dissipation. We observe high-temperature electronic signatures of skyrmions in magnetic insulators, topological Hall effect, by engineering heterostructures consisting of heavy metals and magnetic insulators. This new platform is essential for exploring fundamental magnon-skyrmion physics and pursuing practical applications based on insulating skyrmions. To have the highest operation speed, we explore compensated ferrimagnetic insulators, which have THz dynamics due to the strong exchange coupling field. We realize energy efficient switching of the ferrimagnetic insulator in both ferrimagnetic and antiferromagnetic states, promising electrical manipulation of ultrafast dynamics.