Abstract
As scalability issues suggest an approaching end to Moore’s law there is a heightened urgency to develop new, energy efficient nanoelectronic devices. By utilizing the electron spin rather than charge, spintronic technologies answer this challenge by offering the opportunity to realize dissipation free data storage and logic devices. Skyrmions have recently been promoted as a low-power, highly scalable spintronic technology. These unique looped spin textures host a range of fascinating phenomena due to their topologically protected quantum state, and offer great potential for low dissipation magnetic information storage. We have recently demonstrated the realization of room temperature artificial Bloch skyrmion lattices over extended areas in their ground state by patterning asymmetric magnetic nanodots with controlled circularity on a PMA underlayer [1]. Another promising route to achieving highly energy-efficient spintronic devices is magneto-ionic control of metal/oxide heterostructures. We have demonstrated effective magneto-ionic manipulation of GdFe/NiCoO interfaces due to a redox-driven oxygen migration, manifested through the interface-sensitive exchange bias effect [2]. We further show that the magnetoelectric coupling moderated by voltage-driven oxygen migration extends beyond the interface region in relatively thick AlOx/GdOx/Co(15 nm) films [3]. These results show promising new approaches towards future spin-based nanoelectronics.
This work has been supported by the NSF (DMR-1008791, ECCS-1232275, and DMR-1543582), NRC and DOC.

1. D. A. Gilbert, et al, Nat. Commun. 6, 8462, (2015).
2. D. A. Gilbert, et al, Nat. Commun. 7, 11050 (2016).
3. D. A. Gilbert, et al, Nat. Commun. submitted.