LIONESS - Light-controlled nanomagnetic and spintronic applications via magneto-thermoplasmonics

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Major breakthroughs in information technologies over the past 50 years have relied heavily on knowledge of electronic processes, utilisation of magnetic states (such as giant magnetoresistance read heads for hard drives) and usage of lasers (e.g., CDs and fibre optics). Today, information technologies are ubiquitous, allowing us to solve more and more complex computational problems than ever.Nowadays, a key concern is to improve the efficiency of digital devices, coupled with miniaturisation and increased processing speed, as the increase in computational power and data density comes at high costs with respect to energy consumption. This is made worse by the fact that - rather than being used in an effective way - a sizeable fraction of electricity used to drive modern chips gets dissipated as heat, which can have negative effects on device performance and data retention.However, heat itself is not bad, and particularly interesting phenomena potentially useful for future computational devices, occur in situations where the temperature distribution is not uniform, e.g., if one side of a device is hot while its opposite side is cold. In combination with magnetic materials, such heat differentials can be used to (i) generate electricity, (ii) move spin structures that encode information bits, or (iii) enhance unconventional computing schemes by their intrinsic stochasticity. To date, our experimental understanding of these effects, and their effective integration into devices is hampered by the fact that contemporary methods to create heat differentials lack the flexibility to be suitable for miniaturised technological applications, as they are slow and have large spatial extension, can be prone to damage, and - most importantly - are not reconfigurable.Taking inspiration from the field of photonics and functional magnetic materials, here I will implement a hybrid approach for novel magneto-thermoplasmonic devices: The main objective of the Fellowship is to develop a novel experimental platform enabling fast, precise, and reconfigurable optical control of nano- to microscale temperature distributions by light for key magnetic and spintronic applications. Specific aims are to (i) create fast and optically reconfigurable spin current generators, (ii) experimentally quantify the thermally driven motion of spin textures to further our understanding of fundamental phenomena, and (iii) use light as a flexible and high-bandwidth input for unconventional nanomagnetic computation schemes.The research outputs generated with the Fellowship will tackle fundamental questions regarding non-equilibrium behaviour of magnetic materials, and the newly developed magneto-thermoplasmonic platform will generate impact on the areas of spintronics, optically reconfigurable metamaterials, and energy.