ON THE COVER
March 13, 2024
Electronic devices that incorporate magnetism, called spintronic devices, can increase the functionality of electronic circuits and lead to increases in efficiency. Such devices are useful if the magnetization can be manipulated electrically rather than by magnetic fields. This review covers the materials, underlying physics, and applications involved in such manipulation, focusing on two control mechanisms. The first is control by manipulating the magnetization through its coupling to ferroelectric order and the second is control by spin-polarized currents manipulating the magnetization through the angular momentum flowing into it.
Albert Fert et al.
Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 015005 (2024)
NEW ARTICLE
In many solids, the spin-orbit interaction is only a small effect. However, in certain materials it leads to new phenomena. This Colloquium reviews the role of spin-orbit interaction in superconducting hybrid structures, where it can lead to exotic states such as spin-triplet pairing, topological superconductivity, and the superconducting diode effect. These are fundamental interest and importance for applications, including spintronics and quantum computing.
Morten Amundsen et al.
Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 021003 (2024)
NEW ARTICLE
The theory of unconventional superconductors continues to provide profound puzzles. The crossover between the weakly coupled Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state and the strong-pairing Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) provides a useful perspective on how to address these questions. This paper describes a self-consistent framework for thinking about the crossover regime in between these two limits. The review discusses to what extent this BCS-BEC theory applies to a range of classes of superconducting materials including the cuprates, iron pnictides, twisted bilayer graphene, and interfacial superconductivity among others.
Qijin Chen et al.
Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 025002 (2024)
NEW ARTICLE
Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond are sensitive to magnetic fields, and a single center permits detection of electron and nuclear spins and imaging of single molecules in its vicinity. This article reviews the achievements of advanced methods to obtain spectral and spatial resolution and it points to technical problems that remain to be solved for widespread and multidisciplinary adoption of single-molecule magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Jiangfeng Du et al.
Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 025001 (2024)
NEW ARTICLE
Artificially engineered mechanical systems, sometimes called metamaterials, offer many promising applications on length scales ranging from macroscopic systems to the nanoscale. A topic of particular interest is the existence of topologically protected phononic edge states in such systems that are analogous to the electronic edge states that give rise to the quantum Hall effect. This Colloquium gives an introduction to topologically protected transport in metamaterials and its applications for controlling acoustic transport.
Tirth Shah, Christian Brendel, Vittorio Peano, and Florian Marquardt
Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 021002 (2024)