News

On October 23rd and 24th, SPICE hosted the 29th REIMEI and ERATO-SQR workshop. The organisers Junichi Ieda and Jairo Sinova brought together leading theorists and experimentalists to work on effects of the spin-orbit interaction and the coupling of the spin and lattice degrees of freedom in magnetic nanostructures.

Being an efficient spin current detector and generating so-called spin-orbit torques on proximity magnets, the spin Hall effect has moved into the mainstream of magnetism. The electrical and thermal actuation of the magnetization of insulators with extremely high quality factors of the magnetization dynamics has focused attention on the bosonic degrees of freedom in spintronics and the importance of the spin-lattice and spin-rotation couplings.

The scope of the workshop covered the topics:

• The magnon-phonon interaction in a magnetic insulator (YIG) to better understand acoustically induced spin pumping and the spin Seebeck effect.
• Materials with large spin-orbit interaction examined by combining density functional theory in the local density approximation with the quantum Monte Carlo technique.
• The effects of spin-orbit interaction on the magnetization dynamics of ferro-, feri-, and antiferro-magnets and their heterostructures.
• Spin current generation in solids and fluids.

For more information,visit the workshop website.

From June 29 to July 2, the second official SPICE Workshop took place in Schloß Waldthausen. An international group of 51 participants from different disciplines came together in the scenic castle to share their expertise on a new class of materials known as bad metals and its behavior in Mott Systems. This fundamental emergent physics topic is now being applied in the design and fabrication of new devices such as resistance-switching devices, novel power transistors, as well as “synaptic” devices that mimic the function of the neuron, to name just a few of the possibilities. Yet, The so-called “Bad-metal” behavior phenomenon is often viewed as one of the key unresolved signatures of strong correlation physics. Thirty-two invited speakers from different European countries, Japan, the USA, China, India and Brasil contributed their perspectives on the fundamental issues associated with the new type of phase transition observed in Bad Metals, and its many consequences for material science and technology. Furthermore, 19 poster presentations and four tutorials were given.