Flexomagnetism for novel nanotechnology

Magnetic materials offer promising solutions to finding new paradigms for information technology.

This is urgently needed to solve problems like an unsustainable, ever-increasing energy use, as IT permeates all parts of our lives.

Some of the most appealing phenomena for this purpose, like chiral or topological magnetic phases, rely on rare relativistic interactions, requiring heavy elements and broken inversion symmetry.

Recently, flexomagnetism, defined as the coupling between curvature/strain gradients and magnetism, have turned up as an alternative and more general path to induce and control these exotic magnetic phenomena, particularly relevant given the overwhelming current research interest in 2D magnetic monolayers, with extreme flexibility.While the lion’s share of work in the topic, so far, relied on micromagnetic models, preliminary results show that a proper first principles treatment, including relativistic effects, is crucial for a correct description of flexomagnetism.

In this project, the necessary first principles methodology is established and used to study flexomagnetic phenomena in 2D and 3D nanomagnets.

The aim is to establish the emergence of novel, curvature induced chiral or topological magnetism, and to guide experimental discovery of new materials exhibiting these phenomena.

The complex interplay between curvature, magnetism and electric polarization in bent magnets is also addressed, facilitating advanced new magnetoelectric functionality.