Ultrafast pulses, spin torque and artificial antiferromagnets
Xavier Waintal (INAC CEA, Grenoble, France)

Artificial antiferromagnets (Ferromagnetic-Normal-Ferromagnetic spin valves (antiferromagnetically coupled by the interlayer exchange interaction) can be viewed as the spintronics version of the Fabry-Perot interferometer. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of dynamical control of interference pattern with ultra-fast voltage pulses. I will show that this idea can be used on artificial antiferromagnets to control the magnetic exchange interaction leading to a new sort of (dynamical) spin torque. In a second part, I will discuss the magnetic response of these artificial antiferromagnets to spin torque, that naturally leads to spin torque oscillator (STO) behavior even in the absence of external fields. I will also take this opportunity to advertise our open source quantum transport code Kwant (http://kwant-project.org), that was used to obtain a large fraction of the results shown in this talk.