Voltage‐Induced Coercivity Reduction in Nanoporous Alloy Films: A Boost toward Energy‐Efficient Magnetic Actuation |
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| Authors: | Alberto Quintana Jin Zhang Eloy Isarain‐Chávez Enric Menéndez Ramón Cuadrado Roberto Robles Maria Dolors Baró Miguel Guerrero Salvador Pané Bradley J. Nelson Carlos Maria Müller Pablo Ordejón Josep Nogués Eva Pellicer Jordi Sort |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Departament de Física, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain;2. Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), CSIC and The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain;3. Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS), ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland;4. Departament de Ciència de Materials i Química Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain;5. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain |
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| Abstract: | Magnetic data storage and magnetically actuated devices are conventionally controlled by magnetic fields generated using electric currents. This involves significant power dissipation by Joule heating effect. To optimize energy efficiency, manipulation of magnetic information with lower magnetic fields (i.e., lower electric currents) is desirable. This can be accomplished by reducing the coercivity of the actuated material. Here, a drastic reduction of coercivity is observed at room temperature in thick (≈600 nm), nanoporous, electrodeposited Cu–Ni films by simply subjecting them to the action of an electric field. The effect is due to voltage‐induced changes in the magnetic anisotropy. The large surface‐area‐to‐volume ratio and the ultranarrow pore walls of the system allow the whole film, and not only the topmost surface, to effectively contribute to the observed magnetoelectric effect. This waives the stringent “ultrathin‐film requirement” from previous studies, where small voltage‐driven coercivity variations were reported. This observation expands the already wide range of applications of nanoporous materials (hitherto in areas like energy storage or catalysis) and it opens new paradigms in the fields of spintronics, computation, and magnetic actuation in general. |
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| Keywords: | coercivity energy efficiency magnetic actuation magnetoelectric effects nanoporous alloys |
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