Thesis subject: Beyond Binary: Multistate spintronics in magnetoelectric antiferromagnets.

You will join the diffraction group at ILL, Grenoble, France. The diffraction group operates several powder and single-crystal diffractometer dedicated to the determination of crystal and magnetic structures in condensed matter systems. You will be enrolled at the Technical University of Denmark, where you will spend 6 months.

The current slowdown in transistor density growth compared to Moore’s law has driven the emergence of spintronics, a field exploring next-generation devices that exploit not only the electron’s charge but also its spin and associated magnetic moment. Magnetoelectric materials are central to this research due to their remarkable properties: the control of electric polarization by a magnetic field and of magnetization by an electric field.

This project aims to explore controllable multi-state memory states in ferrotoroidic materials—ferrotoroidicity being the fourth ferroic order alongside ferromagnetism, ferroelectricity, and ferroelasticity. Recent studies on a magnetoelectric and antiferromagnetic orthophosphate single crystal demonstrated electric- and magnetic-field control of four distinct magnetic domains—an unprecedented achievement in bulk antiferromagnets. Switchable antiferromagnetic multistate devices hold strong potential for enabling a paradigm shift from charge-based to spin-based microelectronics.

We will investigate powder and single-crystal samples using complementary techniques, including bulk property measurements, unpolarized neutron diffraction, and spherical neutron polarimetry. The key goal of the project is to examine the conditions under which the multistate, controllable antiferromagnetic domains may be reproducibly switched.