Perspectives on classical and quantum spintronics
Pietro Gambardella, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Monday 16 June 2025, 12.00 PM*
ICMAB - Sala d'Actes Carles Miravitlles and ONLINE (Register here)
*Coffee and cookies by 11:45 AM
Abstract
Spintronics is defined by the ability to control the flow of electric charges by magnetization, and vice versa. In heterostructures, spin and orbital currents mediate the transfer of nonequilibrium magnetic momenta between neighbouring materials. Decoupling these currents from charge flow enables electrical control of the magnetization in metals and insulators, as well as the manipulation of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic spin textures on short temporal and spatial scales. This talk will provide an overview of recent advances in spintronics that exploit charge-spin conversion phenomena, unravelling different ways to generate spin-orbital currents and demonstrating how they can be harnessed to drive domain wall motion, switch magnetic logic gates, and control magnetic tunnel junctions for nonvolatile random-access memory. Finally, I will discuss experiments that use spin torques to perform quantum operations on single spins in molecular tunnel junctions, exploring the potential of spin currents for quantum technologies.
Short bio
Pietro Gambardella holds the Chair of Magnetism and Interface Physics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Genova, Italy, and obtained a PhD in Physics from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institut for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart in 2001 and a Research Assistant at EPFL until 2005. From 2006 to 2012 he was an ICREA Research Professor and Group Leader of the Atomic Manipulation and Spectroscopy Laboratory at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology in Barcelona. Prof. Gambardella’s research focuses on the study of the magnetic and transport properties of thin film heterostructures and spintronic devices, single atom magnets, and experimental techniques that probe magnetic phenomena with high temporal and spatial resolution.
