To appreciate why this matters, it helps to understand what actually happens inside a superconductor when current flows. When certain materials are cooled below a characteristic transition temperature, their electrical resistance vanishes. This remarkable behavior arises because electrons, which normally repel one another, form correlated pairs known as Cooper pairs. These pairs move collectively through the material as a single coherent quantum wave, a state that allows current to flow without dissipating energy as heat. It is this collective quantum condensate that makes superconductors attractive for technologies ranging from powerful magnets and sensitive detectors to quantum information processors. But the dissipationless state has its limits. If the current becomes too large, superconductivity breaks down, and the critical current defines exactly where that breakdown occurs.

In type-II superconductors, the workhorse materials of most practical applications, the experimentally observed critical current is usually not determined by the microscopic properties of the superconducting state itself. Instead, it is governed by the motion of vortices, tiny whirlpools through which magnetic flux penetrates the material. At sufficiently high current, these vortices begin to move, and their motion generates resistance and heat that can push the entire material out of its superconducting state. In other words, when a conventional measurement reports that a superconductor has reached its limit, it is often the vortices that have given up first, not the superconductivity itself.

Beneath this vortex-imposed ceiling lies a higher, intrinsic limit known as the depairing current. Eryin Wang, lead author of the study, offers a vivid picture of what happens at this fundamental threshold. One way to imagine it, he explains, is that the current twists the phase of the coherent quantum state of the superconductor, rather like winding a spring. If the superconducting condensate is twisted too far, the superconducting state becomes unstable, and at this threshold the Cooper pairs responsible for superconductivity begin to break apart. Because vortex motion and heating normally occur long before the intrinsic phase is pushed to this point, the depairing current has been extraordinarily difficult to reach using conventional direct-current transport measurements. The vortex dynamics always win the race.

The MPSD team’s breakthrough came from changing the rules of that race. Our strategy was to outrun the vortex dynamics, says Wang. Vortices typically move at velocities of tens of kilometres per second, which sounds impressively fast until you consider the timescale involved. At those speeds, a vortex travels only tens of nanometres during a single picosecond, a trillionth of a second. A sufficiently short current pulse can therefore reach extremely high current densities before the vortices have had any time to move and heat the sample. This strongly suppresses vortex-induced dissipation and allows the superconducting condensate itself to be pushed much closer to its intrinsic limit. In effect, the researchers delivered the electrical equivalent of a sprint so fast that the obstacles never got moving.

Generating such ultrashort currents required specialized equipment. To apply current to superconductors for only a few picoseconds, the team used the ultrafast electrical-transport platform that they have been developing at their institute, explains Guido Meier, co-author of the study. In this platform, photoconductive switches are activated by green laser pulses lasting just 300 femtoseconds, with a wavelength of 515 nanometres. These laser-triggered switches generate electrical pulses of only a few picoseconds in duration, which are then guided along a coplanar waveguide and through micrometre-scale superconducting samples. The approach effectively converts ultrafast optics into an ultrafast electrical probe, giving researchers a tool to interrogate superconductors on the natural timescales of their own quantum dynamics rather than on the far slower timescales of vortex motion and thermal diffusion.

The researchers chose to compare two superconductors whose superconducting states are fundamentally different: niobium nitride (NbN) and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO). NbN possesses a more uniform energy gap of the type known as s-wave, meaning the energy cost of breaking a Cooper pair is essentially the same in every direction. YBCO, by contrast, has a strongly direction-dependent gap of the d-wave type, which varies with direction and even vanishes along certain crystallographic axes. Comparing these two materials under identical ultrafast conditions offered a way to reveal how the microscopic structure of superconductivity affects its breakdown when currents approach the depairing regime.

The contrast between the two materials was striking. In NbN, the superconducting state remained robust until the current reached a well-defined threshold far higher than the usual DC critical current. Beyond that point, the response changed abruptly, indicating that the Cooper pairs responsible for superconductivity were breaking apart in a sudden, collective fashion. YBCO responded very differently: its superconducting state weakened gradually as the current increased, with no single sharp collapse. The researchers link this contrast directly to the different internal structures of the two superconductors. Because the superconducting energy gap in NbN is nearly the same in all directions, the material holds together until the depairing threshold is crossed everywhere at once. In YBCO, where the gap varies strongly and disappears along certain directions, superconductivity can be eroded progressively rather than failing at a single sharp threshold.

Beyond the immediate spectacle of driving superconductors to unprecedented current densities, the work carries significant implications for how scientists study these materials. Our results suggest that picosecond transport can provide access to microscopic properties of superconductors, including their gap symmetry, that are not directly available from conventional DC transport, says Andrea Cavalleri, who leads the research group. In other words, the shape of the breakdown curve under ultrafast pulsing encodes information about the quantum structure of the superconducting state itself, information that traditional measurements obscure behind vortex physics. The researchers caution that measurements on a broader range of superconductors will be needed to determine how generally this connection between ultrafast response and gap symmetry applies, but the demonstration in two such different materials is a compelling start.

More broadly, the study demonstrates that ultrashort electrical pulses can access regimes of superconducting transport that are normally hidden by slower processes such as vortex motion and heating. This opens new possibilities for probing and controlling superconductors on their intrinsic timescales, and it suggests that the practical limits of superconducting devices may be more negotiable than previously assumed. A regime of ultra-high-current superconductivity, even if sustained only for picoseconds, could influence the design of ultrafast optoelectronic devices and potentially magnetic technologies, where the ability to deliver intense, dissipationless current pulses on demand would be a powerful new capability. For a field that has spent a century mapping the boundaries of lossless electricity, the message of this work is provocative: some of those boundaries were never walls at all, merely the shadows of things too slow to keep up.

Subject of Research: Picosecond current pulses driving type-II superconductors beyond their critical-current limit to probe depairing dynamics and gap symmetry

Article Title: Outrunning the vortices: Picosecond pulses push superconductors beyond their critical-current limit

Article References: Outrunning the vortices: Picosecond pulses push superconductors beyond their critical-current limit. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: superconductivity, critical current, depairing current, Cooper pairs, magnetic vortices, picosecond pulses, ultrafast transport, NbN, YBCO, gap symmetry, type-II superconductors, Nature Physics

The distinction between what is measured and what is real comes down to the physics of vortices. Type-II superconductors are characterized by a magnetic penetration depth that exceeds the superconducting coherence length, which means magnetic fields penetrate the material as quantized whirlpools of current called vortices. Below a lower critical field, no vortices enter; above an upper critical field, they crowd the sample and superconductivity dies entirely. When a current flows, each vortex feels a Lorentz force. If that force exceeds the pinning that defects in the material provide, the vortices begin to move, dissipating energy and heating the sample until it flips into its normal, resistive state. The critical current density measured this way, denoted Jc, therefore reflects the defect landscape of a particular sample rather than any intrinsic property of the superconducting condensate.

Physicists have long defined a more fundamental quantity: the thermodynamic depairing current density, Jc*. This is the current at which the energy shift imparted to quasiparticles by the supercurrent equals the superconducting energy gap itself. Beyond this point, it is no longer energetically favorable for electrons to remain bound in Cooper pairs, and the condensate dissociates into normal charge carriers. Unlike Jc, Jc* depends only on microscopic parameters such as the superfluid density and the coherence length, making it a genuine material property and the theoretical ceiling for supercurrents. Yet despite decades of theoretical predictions and indirect hints, directly measuring Jc* has remained out of reach, because any direct current strong enough to approach it sets vortices in motion within nanoseconds, destroying the superconducting state before depairing can be observed.

The new study, published in Nature Physics by E. Wang of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg and colleagues, exploits a window in time where vortex physics simply cannot keep up. Vortices move at speeds limited to a few tens of kilometres per second, which means that within a two-picosecond pulse they can travel only a few tens of nanometres, nowhere near enough to cross a sample tens of micrometres wide. On these timescales, vortex motion is inertially frozen near the sample edges, dissipation is negligible, and the bulk of the superconductor experiences a pure, dissipationless supercurrent pushed all the way to its intrinsic limit. The experiment effectively outruns the very mechanism that has always masked the depairing threshold.

The experimental platform is an elegant piece of ultrafast engineering. The team fabricated thin films of two archetypal superconductors: niobium nitride (NbN), a disordered s-wave superconductor with a critical temperature of 15 kelvin, and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), a d-wave cuprate superconducting at 85 kelvin. Each film was integrated into a coplanar waveguide with three pairs of photoconductive switches. Femtosecond laser pulses at 515 nanometres strike the middle pair of voltage-biased switches, launching current pulses with a full width at half maximum of roughly two picoseconds. Unbiased switches on either side sample the incoming, reflected and transmitted pulses at controlled time delays, allowing the researchers to reconstruct exactly how much current the superconductor carried and how the electromagnetic field responded.

The baseline measurements confirmed the familiar picture. Conventional direct-current tests yielded critical current densities of approximately 100 gigaamperes per square metre for NbN at 7 kelvin and slightly below 50 gigaamperes per square metre for YBCO at 50 kelvin. Below the critical temperature, the picosecond response was unmistakably superconducting: the reflected pulse showed a small inductive feature proportional to the kinetic inductance of the condensate, and about 90 percent of the incoming pulse transmitted through the sample. Above the critical temperature, the response became resistive, with the pulse partially reflected and partially transmitted, exactly as expected for a normal metal.

Then came the dramatic part. When the researchers drove NbN at 7 kelvin with pulses reaching about 6.5 times the conventional critical current density, the sample’s response suddenly resembled its own normal-state behaviour at 20 kelvin, indicating that superconductivity had been transiently suppressed. Tracking the transmitted peak electric field as a function of the peak current density revealed a sharp, well-defined drop at roughly 2.2 times Jc, corresponding to about 220 gigaamperes per square metre. Below that threshold, the transmitted current was carried by Cooper pairs; above it, the current was carried by normal carriers, and the slope of the response matched the normal state. Between the two regimes, the transmitted current actually decreased with increasing drive, a hallmark of rapid Cooper pair breakup. The local maximum in transmitted current marks the depairing current density Jc*, observed directly for the first time in this setting.

YBCO told a strikingly different story. Instead of a sharp threshold, the d-wave cuprate showed a gradual, continuous suppression of superconductivity beginning well before the conventional critical current was reached, with no local maximum in the transmitted current at all. The difference traces back to the symmetry of the superconducting gap. In an s-wave superconductor like NbN, the gap is isotropic, so every Cooper pair breaks at the same critical current, producing a clean threshold. In a d-wave superconductor like YBCO, the gap varies from zero along the nodal directions to its maximum along the antinodal directions. Pairs in different parts of the Fermi surface depair at different currents, so partial depairing begins immediately and accumulates continuously, and a well-defined Jc* simply does not exist. The picosecond technique thus doubles as a probe of gap symmetry in materials that cannot easily be accessed by conventional spectroscopy.

The researchers took care to rule out alternative explanations. All measurements were performed under zero-field cooling with ambient magnetic fields shielded below one microtesla, ensuring no pre-existing vortices in the sample. Even in the most pessimistic scenario, a vortex could move no more than a few tens of nanometres during a pulse, making full penetration implausible. And the stark contrast between the s-wave and d-wave responses points to a mechanism rooted in the microscopic gap structure rather than in vortex dynamics. On the theory side, simulations based on Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory in the dirty limit, using the Usadel equation with parameters taken directly from experimental characterization, reproduced the sharp transmission drop in NbN, attributing it to the strong nonlinearity of the superfluid density. Time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory, valid only near the critical temperature, could not capture this nonlinearity. The calculated temperature dependence of Jc* also agreed closely with the measurements, with experimental values slightly below theory, plausibly because thermal fluctuations initiate depairing marginally early. At 0.8 times the critical temperature, the conventional critical current was nearly an order of magnitude smaller than the intrinsic depairing current.

The implications extend in two directions. Fundamentally, the technique opens a route to probing superconducting properties, including gap symmetry and condensate stiffness, in regimes that conventional transport cannot touch, and it may eventually help interrogate cuprate superconductors for which no complete microscopic theory exists even in equilibrium. Practically, the results show that the maximum supercurrent a type-II superconductor can sustain is accessible on picosecond timescales, suggesting a platform for generating ultrashort, intense magnetic field pulses and for superconducting electronics that operate closer to their intrinsic current limits. For a field in which the gap between what materials can do and what engineers can measure has persisted for more than half a century, outrunning the vortices may prove to be one of the most consequential ideas in modern superconducting research.

Subject of Research: Picosecond measurement of the intrinsic depairing current density in type-II superconductors

Article Title: Probing picosecond depairing currents in type-II superconductors

Article References: Wang, E., Chavez-Cervantes, M., Satapathy, J., Matsuyama, T., Meier, G., Zhang, X., You, L., Marijanovic, F., Curtis, J. B., Demler, E., & Cavalleri, A. (2026). Probing picosecond depairing currents in type-II superconductors. Nature Physics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-026-03469-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41567-026-03469-z

Keywords: superconductivity, depairing current, type-II superconductors, picosecond pulses, Cooper pairs, vortices, NbN, YBCO, s-wave gap, d-wave gap, ultrafast transport, BCS theory

Spintronics, the field that exploits the spin of electrons rather than merely their charge, has long promised memory devices that combine non-volatility with high speed. In modern magnetic random-access memory, information is stored in the orientation of a nanoscale magnet and written by transferring angular momentum from a spin-polarized current, a mechanism known as spin–orbit torque. When a current flows through a heavy-metal layer adjacent to a ferromagnet, the resulting torque can switch the magnet’s direction, encoding a zero or a one. The efficiency of that process, however, is governed by the current pulses available from the surrounding circuitry, and this is precisely where the new work makes its mark.

Conventional electronic pulse generators struggle to deliver the combination of amplitude, duration and on-chip integration that aggressive magnetic switching demands. Fast transistors and modulated laser schemes have been explored, but each carries trade-offs in footprint, energy cost or compatibility with dense integrated circuits. The alternative demonstrated here is deceptively simple in concept: a nanoplasma switch embedded on the chip itself. When a modest voltage is applied across a nanoscale gap, the device undergoes a rapid ionization event, forming a miniature plasma discharge that conducts an intense burst of current for an extraordinarily brief interval before extinguishing itself.

The physics of these discharges is rooted in well-understood gas ionization and electron avalanche processes, yet the nanoscale confinement changes the picture considerably. Because the active region is so small, the plasma forms and collapses on timescales set not by bulky external electronics but by the intrinsic carrier dynamics within the gap. The result is a current pulse measured in picoseconds, far faster than the switching speeds of the transistors that would otherwise be needed. Importantly, the switch is not a laboratory curiosity built with exotic equipment; it is fabricated using processes compatible with standard chip manufacturing, which means pulse generation can sit directly alongside the magnetic elements it drives.

The central experimental finding reported in the underlying research is that pulses produced by these nanoplasma switches are fast enough and strong enough to control the magnetization of ferromagnetic heterostructures through spin–orbit torque. In such heterostructures — stacks in which a heavy metal with strong spin–orbit coupling is paired with a thin ferromagnetic layer — the direction of the applied torque depends on the direction of the current. A pulse that drives electrons one way can set the magnet to one orientation; a pulse in the opposite direction can set it to the other. Demonstrating reliable reversal under picosecond excitation is the critical milestone, because it shows that the write mechanism of spintronic memory can keep pace with the fastest pulse sources now available on chip.

Speed matters for more than bragging rights. As memory devices shrink, thermal fluctuations make their magnetic bits less stable, and the window of current amplitudes that switch the bit deterministically narrows. Ultrafast pulses change this balance: they deliver torque in a burst short enough that switching can complete before the accumulated heat spreads through the device, potentially improving energy efficiency while maintaining reliability. Prior studies have shown that sub-nanosecond currents can reduce switching energies relative to slower write operations, and the picosecond regime explored here pushes that trend toward its physical limits. The commentary also situates the result within a growing body of work on plasma-based ultrafast electronics, including earlier demonstrations of nanoscale discharge devices that achieved picosecond switching without semiconductors at all.

Integration is the second pillar of the advance. A pulse generator that lives on the same chip as the memory cell eliminates the parasitic losses of off-chip interconnects, which otherwise smear and attenuate fast pulses before they reach the magnetic element. By placing the nanoplasma switch adjacent to the heterostructure, the researchers ensure that the full amplitude and sharpness of the discharge current arrive where they are needed. This co-location is what makes the approach practical: it converts an impressive physics demonstration into a plausible circuit element. The switch behaves, in effect, as a self-contained nanoscale pulse source that the surrounding CMOS logic can trigger with ordinary voltage signals.

The implications reach beyond memory. Spin–orbit torque switching underlies proposals for magnetic neuromorphic computing, where nanoscale magnets act as artificial neurons, and for non-von Neumann architectures that blur the boundary between storage and computation. If write pulses can be generated on demand in picoseconds with minimal overhead, the operating envelope of such systems widens dramatically. Arrays of nanoplasma-switched magnetic bits could, in principle, be reconfigured at rates approaching terahertz-scale dynamics, although the commentary is careful to note that translating single-device demonstrations into large-scale arrays will require careful management of discharge repeatability, electrode wear and thermal design.

Indeed, the researchers and the commentary both acknowledge the engineering questions that remain. Plasma discharges involve energetic ions and electrons that can erode the electrodes over many switching cycles, and guaranteeing that every pulse has identical amplitude is essential if the switching statistics of the magnetic element are to remain deterministic across billions of operations. Understanding the discharge physics at the nanoscale — how the plasma ignites, how it evolves during the picosecond pulse, and how it decays — will be essential for modeling device lifetimes. The field has already seen rapid progress: recent theoretical and experimental studies of spin–orbit torque, together with related ultrafast switching demonstrations in plasma-based electronics, suggest a maturing toolkit from which robust designs can emerge.

For now, the demonstration marks a conceptual shift. Rather than building ever-faster transistors to drive magnetic devices, engineers can borrow a page from plasma physics and let a nanoscale discharge do the work. The commentary in Nature Electronics frames the result as a step toward ultrafast spintronic systems in which the pulse generation, the magnetic switching and the sensing circuitry all coexist on a single chip. If the remaining reliability and scaling challenges can be met, on-chip nanoplasma switching could become the standard heartbeat of the fastest memories and spin-based processors — devices that write their bits in trillionths of a second while drawing power budgets compatible with mainstream computing.

Subject of Research: On-chip nanoplasma switches generating picosecond current pulses for ultrafast spin–orbit torque switching in ferromagnetic heterostructures

Article Title: On-chip nanoplasma switches for ultrafast spintronics

Article References: Díaz, E. (2026). On-chip nanoplasma switches for ultrafast spintronics. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01711-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01711-3

Keywords: spintronics, nanoplasma, spin–orbit torque, magnetic memory, picosecond pulses, Nature Electronics, ferromagnetic heterostructures, on-chip switching, magnetization reversal, nanoscale devices, MRAM, plasma electronics

The significance of the result lies in what it removes from the equation. Spin–orbit torque (SOT) switching, the physical mechanism at the heart of the work, allows engineers to reverse the direction of magnetization in a nanoscale magnetic layer by injecting an in-plane current into an adjacent heavy metal. The current’s spin angular momentum is transferred to the magnet, exerting a torque that can tip its north and south poles. Because the effect is purely electrical, it has long been viewed as the natural write mechanism for next-generation magnetic random-access memory (MRAM), a technology that stores data in magnetic orientations rather than electric charges and therefore retains information even when power is removed. The catch has always been speed and energy: writing reliably with conventional electronics has typically required pulses lasting microseconds or longer, dissipating far more energy than an ideal memory cell should.

Picosecond pulses, by contrast, promise a dramatic shortcut. When the write pulse is compressed from microseconds down to a few trillionths of a second, the energy delivered scales down accordingly, and the magnetization dynamics themselves enter a faster, more coherent regime. But generating such pulses has traditionally demanded mode-locked laser systems and photoconductive switches, an approach that is bulky, expensive, power-hungry and fundamentally incompatible with the dense, CMOS-integrated architecture a commercial memory chip requires. The Singapore team’s answer was to abandon optics altogether and exploit a phenomenon more familiar to high-voltage engineers than to memory designers: the abrupt, avalanche-like breakdown of a plasma confined within a nanoscale gap.

The device works by charging a capacitor-like structure and then letting a nanometer-scale gap break down in a controlled discharge. When the voltage across the tiny gap exceeds a threshold, a nanoplasma forms almost instantaneously, and the stored charge dumps through the gap in a burst measured in picoseconds. Because the discharge is triggered purely by voltage, the entire pulse generator can be patterned lithographically alongside the magnetic devices it is meant to drive, making it genuinely chip-compatible. In their experiments, the researchers showed that the generator could produce pulses as short as 6.4 picoseconds with peak amplitudes above 100 volts, figures that place the device firmly in the territory previously accessible only to optical pump–probe setups.

Armed with this electrical pulse source, the team turned to their magnetic test structures: trilayers of cobalt separated and sandwiched with platinum, a configuration in which the two cobalt layers are antiferromagnetically coupled through the platinum spacer. This symmetry is not incidental. Field-free switching, meaning deterministic reversal of perpendicular magnetization without the aid of an external magnetic field, has been a long-standing goal in the SOT community, because an external field would be impractical to supply in a dense memory array. Earlier work from the same group and others had shown that synthetic antiferromagnetic trilayers can achieve field-free switching at sub-nanosecond timescales; the new study pushes that capability into the picosecond domain using a fully integrated electrical source.

The headline result is a sweeping energy comparison. When the researchers varied the pulse width from 100 microseconds all the way down to 6.4 picoseconds, they found that the energy required to switch the magnetization fell by four orders of magnitude. In other words, writing the same magnetic bit with a picosecond pulse costs roughly ten thousand times less energy than writing it with the microsecond pulses that have been standard in laboratory demonstrations. For an industry in which data-center memory power consumption is a growing fraction of global electricity use, a four-decade reduction in per-bit write energy is the kind of number that translates directly into real-world impact.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the study is the physical explanation the authors offer for why the picosecond regime is so efficient. Naively, one might expect that a shorter pulse delivers less total torque and therefore makes switching harder, not easier. The team found instead that ultrafast Joule heating plays a constructive role: the intense, brief current pulse transiently heats the magnetic layer, lowering the energy barrier that the magnetization must overcome to reverse. This thermally assisted switching mechanism, the authors argue, contributes significantly to the enhanced efficiency observed in the picosecond regime. The idea echoes concepts from heat-assisted magnetic recording, where a laser briefly softens a recording medium before writing, but here the heating is delivered electrically, on the same timescale as the write operation itself, and confined to the immediate vicinity of the bit.

The researchers verified the switching behavior using magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) microscopy, which images the out-of-plane magnetization of the devices before and after pulse application, confirming deterministic reversal under the 6.4-picosecond pulses. They also extended their analysis to ferrimagnetic films, examining how the critical current density and switching energy depend on pulse width across both ferro- and ferrimagnetic systems, a comparison that matters because compensated ferrimagnets are among the most promising materials for ultrafast, thermally robust spintronic memory.

The broader implications reach beyond a single memory technology. An on-chip source of picosecond, high-voltage electrical pulses is a tool, not just a component: the same generator that writes magnetic bits could, in principle, drive ultrafast electronics experiments, terahertz-scale signal generation, or other spintronic operations that have historically been gated by access to laser facilities. Because the nanoplasma switch builds on prior demonstrations of nanoplasma-enabled picosecond switching for ultrafast electronics, the work also signals a convergence between two previously separate research communities, high-speed electrical engineering and magnetism, that now share a common enabling device.

Challenges remain before such pulse generators appear inside commercial MRAM products. The discharge-based approach must prove its endurance over billions of write cycles, its uniformity across millions of cells on a wafer, and its compatibility with the back-end-of-line thermal budgets of CMOS manufacturing. The peak voltages involved, while modest in absolute terms, will need careful management in dense circuit environments. Still, the demonstration marks a conceptual milestone: picosecond spin–orbit torque switching, once the exclusive province of optics laboratories, can now be triggered by nothing more exotic than a voltage applied to a patterned on-chip structure. If the endurance and scalability questions can be answered, the all-electric nanoplasma pulse generator may well become the write engine of a new generation of memory, one that flips its bits in trillionths of a second while sipping, rather than gulping, energy.

Subject of Research: An all-electric on-chip nanoplasma pulse generator enabling picosecond field-free spin–orbit torque switching in magnetic heterostructures

Article Title: An all-electric on-chip nanoplasma pulse generator for picosecond field-free spin–orbit torque switching in magnetic heterostructures

Article References: Chen, X., Zhao, S., Pu, Y., Yang, Q., & Yang, H. (2026). An all-electric on-chip nanoplasma pulse generator for picosecond field-free spin–orbit torque switching in magnetic heterostructures. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01699-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01699-w

Keywords: spin–orbit torque, nanoplasma, picosecond pulses, MRAM, magnetization switching, magnetic heterostructures, field-free switching, Joule heating, spintronics, Nature Electronics, energy-efficient memory, cobalt platinum trilayers