What once began with spin-polarized electric currents in ferromagnets and the giant magnetoresistance, today is an internationally overarching research field known as spintronics. The last two decades, in particular, saw the consolidation of spintronics into modern solid state research. This was possible in large parts thanks to the experimental confirmation of the spin Hall effect and its inverse counterpart that enables electrical detection of pure spin currents. By now, it is known that the electronic spin not only couples to magnetic but also electric fields as well as heat gradients, adding interconversion phenomena between spin, charge, and heat to the spintronic inventory, examples being the spin Seebeck, spin Nernst, and Edelstein effects. Being inspired by both the uncovering of fundamental physics as well as the vision that spin will serve as an information carrier, the spintronics community studied a broad range of material classes, including normal, topological, and magnetic metals as well as topological and magnetic insulators. Magnets, in particular, proved to contain a wealth of surprises, exemplified by topological magnons, topological (spin) Hall effects in skyrmion crystals, anomalous Hall effects in antiferromagnets, or the magnetic spin Hall effect.
This SPICE Young Research Leaders Group Workshop serves as a melting pot of ideas on how to tackle the major spintronic challenges of this decade. The program of this workshop is built around the following major questions:
(1) Relying on symmetry arguments, which transport phenomena do we expect?
(2) How does the topological nontriviality of the electronic or magnonic band structure influences spin, charge, and heat transport?
(3) Which materials show particularly large transport and why? (Can we engineer spin transport?)
(4) How do we perform clear-cut experiments to disentangle a particular (spin) transport phenomenon from others?
(5) How do we use the arsenal of spintronics as means to explore and characterize complex materials?