A Japanese–German research consortium aims to harness a special class of magnetic materials for ultrafast, energy-efficient data processing: antiferromagnets. The network is coordinated by Prof. Dr. István Kézsmárki at the University of Augsburg and brings together five leading research groups from Japan and Germany.

Physicists at the University of Augsburg together with collaborators from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Rutgers University, USA, have successfully switched an antiferromagnetic state in an insulator by voltage pulses, within just a few tens of billionths of a second. Their findings were recently published in Physical Review Letters.?

Researchers at the Universities of Augsburg and Groningen have been able to show that the standard picture of magnetisation reversal needs to be expanded. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications and not only enrich basic research, but also open up new perspectives for components in the electronics of the future.

A major new research project led by the University of Augsburg with the Technical Univer-sity Munich (TUM) as partner is dedicated to a key topic of the future: the research and de-velopment of new types of materials whose properties are characterised by quantum ef-fects. In the long term, they could serve as the basis for very powerful computers. The University of Augsburg is involved in another three Collaborative Research Centres.

In a recently published article in the leading physics journal "Nature Physics", a team of researchers with the participation of the University of Augsburg reports about unexpectedly universal correlations between the thermal expansion and the glass-transition temperature of glass-forming materials, providing new insights into the complex nature of the transition from the liquid into the solid glass.

Researchers from the University of Augsburg and ETH Zurich have discovered giant conductivity of nanometre-sized domain walls separating polar regions in a non-oxide ferroelectric material. The high sensitivity of these walls to applied magnetic fields enables gigantic switching of the sample resistance, thus providing a route to new nanoelectronic building blocks. Such behaviour is unprecedented in non-oxides, which are less hampered by defects and deviations in composition than oxides.

A Chinese-German research cooperation involving the University of Augsburg has demonstrated properties in a metal that cannot be explained by the standard theory. The results were obtained on a special metallic compound with unusual magnetic characteristics – scientists call it magnetic frustration.? The cooperation observed a novel, “quantum critical behaviour” in the metal at very low temperatures and at high pressures and strong magnetic fields.