Antiferromagnetic Materials and Their Manipulations

Antiferromagnetic materials are promising for future spintronic applications owing to their intrinsic appealing properties like zero stray field and ultrafast dynamics. In the past decade, a lot of research has been devoted to unraveling spin transport properties in antiferromagnetic materials. It has been realized that antiferromagnets have more to offer than just being used as passive components in exchange bias applications. Especially, the recent demonstrations of electrical manipulation and detection of antiferromagnetic spins opens a new chapter in the story of spintronics. This paradigm shift provides possibilities for radically new concepts for spin control in electronics. Here, we firstly introduce the antiferromagnetic materials suitable for antiferromagnetic spintronics and their fundamental properties. Then the manipulations of antiferromagnetic states including magnetic, strain, optical, and electrical methods, and the intrinsic origins of different antiferromagnets are presented. Finally, we focus on the topological antiferromagnetic spintronics that is exploring the links between antiferromagnetic spintronics and topological structures in real and momentum space.