Van der Waals spin-orbit torque antiferromagnetic memory

The technique of conventional ferromagnet/heavy-metal spin-orbit torque (SOT) offers significant potential for enhancing the efficiency of magnetic memories. However, it faces fundamental physical limitations, including shunting effects from the metallic layer, broken symmetry for enabling antidamping switching, spin scattering caused by interfacial defects, and sensitivity to stray magnetic fields. To address these issues, we here propose a van der Waals (vdW) field-free SOT antiferromagnetic memory using a vdW bilayer ${\mathrm{LaBr}}_{2}$ (an antiferromagnet with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy) and a monolayer ${\mathrm{T}}_{d}$ phase ${\mathrm{WTe}}_{2}$ (a Weyl semimetal with broken inversion symmetry). By systematically employing density functional theory in conjunction with nonequilibrium Green's function methods and macrospin simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed vdW SOT devices exhibit remarkably low critical current density approximately $10\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{MA}/{\mathrm{cm}}^{2}$ and rapid field-free magnetization switching in 250 ps. This facilitates excellent write performance with extremely low energy consumption. Furthermore, the device shows a significantly low read error rate, as evidenced by a high tunnel magnetoresistance ratio of up to 4250%. The superior write and read performance originates from the unique strong on-site (insulating phase) and off-site (magnetic phase) Coulomb interactions in electride ${\mathrm{LaBr}}_{2}$, a large nonzero $z$-component polarization in ${\mathrm{WTe}}_{2}$, and the proximity effect between them.