Harnessing Plasmonic Heating for Switching in Antiferromagnets

Heat waste is a bottleneck in the development of green information technologies and much effort has been devoted to suppress the heating effect in both electronic and spintronic devices. Here, we take an alternative approach and show that controllable heating at the nanoscale can actually benefit information processing. In particular, we study a hybrid nanostructure consisting of a metallic square frame and an antiferromagnetic (AFM) thin film and show that the plasmonic heating can reversibly switch two perpendicularly oriented AFM domains without the assistance of magnetic fields and electric currents. The required switching energy is at the order 1 nJ, 3 to 6 orders of magnitude lower than the current-driven AFM switching. The physical mechanism arises from the thermal-induced strain fields inside the frame, which couple to and manipulate the magnetic orientation via magnetoelastic effect. The strain field direction can be well controlled by selectively exciting the longitudinal and transverse plasmon modes by varying the polarization of the waves, which readily allows for a reversible switching of the AFM vector. Our findings provide tremendous opportunities for optically manipulating the magnetism with ultralow energy consumption and may further promote the interdisciplinary study of photonics, acoustics, and spintronics.