Electrical switching of antiferromagnetic Mn$_2$Au and the role of thermal activation

Understand

Electrical manipulation of antiferromagnets with specific symmetries offers the prospect of creating novel, antiferromagnetic spintronic devices.

• Such devices aim to make use of the insensitivity to external magnetic fields and the ultrafast dynamics at the picosecond timescale intrinsic to antiferromagnets.
• The possibility to electrically switch antiferromagnets was first predicted for Mn2Au and then experimentally observed in tetragonal CuMnAs.
• Here, we report on the electrical switching and detection of the Neel order in epitaxial films of Mn2Au.