Prof. CHEN Jingsheng from National University of Singapore, the 2024 Lee Hsun Lecture Award recipient, visited the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMR, CAS), from December 23 to 24 for academic exchange.
Prof. CHEN Jingsheng delivered an academic lecture titled "Effective Electrical Manipulation of Non-Collinear Antiferromagnetic Order" to IMR researchers and graduate students.
Antiferromagnets have attracted significant attention in the field of high-density, high-speed memory devices in recent years due to their nearly negligible stray magnetic fields and ultrafast magnetic dynamics. However, achieving their low-power, deterministic electrical manipulation remains a key challenge. In his lecture, Prof. CHEN Jingsheng focused on the cutting-edge area of electrical control of antiferromagnetic order. He highlighted his team's latest breakthroughs in realizing efficient, field-free switching of antiferromagnetic order using the Orbital Hall Effect (OHE) and Spin-Orbit Torque (SOT). He detailed the physical mechanisms behind achieving deterministic switching of antiferromagnetic order in the Weyl semimetal Mn3Sn via OHE generated from metallic Mn or oxide CuOₓ. The research also found that inserting specific heavy metal layers (e.g., Pt) can effectively reduce the critical switching current density and improve efficiency. Furthermore, Prof. CHEN Jingsheng's team innovatively combined in-plane and out-of-plane SOT generated from the two-dimensional van der Waals material WTe₂, achieving for the first time experimentally the field-free vertical switching of the magnetic octupole moment in the chiral antiferromagnet Mn3Sn. This approach significantly increased the switching ratio to approximately 80% while reducing the critical current density to the order of 1 MA/cm², providing new principles and pathways for developing next-generation ultrafast, high-density spin memory devices.
Prof. CHEN Jingsheng is an internationally renowned expert in materials physics and spintronics. He earned his Ph.D. from Lanzhou University in 1999, worked at the Data Storage Institute in Singapore, and joined the National University of Singapore in 2007. Prof. CHEN Jingsheng has maintained close collaborations with academia and industry in China. His research areas encompass magnetic memory, oxide non-volatile memory, spintronics, ferroelectric tunnel junctions, and strongly correlated oxide materials. To date, he has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier journals, including Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Science Advances, and Physical Review Letters. He has authored three book chapters, holds more than ten patents, and has delivered over 100 invited talks at major international conferences. His research work has been cited more than 19,000 times, with an H-index of 74. He has secured government and industry research funding exceeding 17 million Singapore dollars. Some of his research achievements have been applied in Seagate Technology's latest generation of hard disk drives (HAMR). Prof. CHEN Jingsheng is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was honored as an IEEE Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2022.
