The ESSL recently opened a new area of research on Altermagnets receiving funds from HFRI (the Greek Research Council) through project AlterMag-26623 – “Altermagnetism: a new magnetic order for spintronics” and the HORIZON EUROPE EIC Pathfinder Open project -AMSwitch-101258102 – “An Altermagnet Switch”. Altermagnets are co-linear antiferromagnets which however behave like ferromagnets in different crystallographic directions. Due to the spontaneously broken time reversal symmetry, these materials exhibit anomalous hall effect despite their zero net magnetization.

In AlerMag project, the ESSL team explores several altermagnet candidate materials such as RuO₂ and a-MnTe and their doping with suitable elements to increase the Neel temperature above room temperature. Moreover, we combine altermagnets with 2D ferromagnetic metals (e.g.  CrTe₂ and Fe_xGeTe₂ ) with the aim to achieve efficient charge to spin conversion and enable all-electrical magnetization switching for energy efficient magnetic memory and logic devices.

In AMSwitch, the ESSL team fabricates a new type of logic devices that harness the new new altermagnetic order to overcome the energy and scaling limits of conventional electronics. By encoding information in the Néel vector and reading it via the anomalous Hall current, we unlock secure, non-volatile, ultra-low-power computation.