Magnonics for ultralow-power computing and quantum information processing

We live in an era of hyper-connectivity, where everything is interconnected. Countless smart devices in households and industries generate and exchange data, leading to a rapid increase in energy consumption. The demand for batteries to power autonomous devices is rising. Data centers, which store and process data, consume massive amounts of energy 24/7. However, traditional semiconductor technologies that rely on electron transport require significant energy, with a considerable portion wasted as heat through Joule heating.

Magnons, collective spin excitations, have emerged as a promising alternative information carrier for ultralow-power devices. Because magnons can propagate without net charge transport, they offer a route to suppress Joule heating while enabling wave-based logic and signal processing. Over the past decade, prototype devices including magnon logic gates and magnon transistors have been developed. Furthermore magnons are compatible with standard semiconductor nanofabrication, making them attractive for on-chip integration. Magnons also strongly interact with other bosonic excitations such as phonons and photons, opening opportunities for transduction between different information carriers.

A key element in this hybrid approach is magnetoelastic coupling, which links spin dynamics to lattice vibrations. When the frequencies of spin waves and acoustic phonons become resonant, magnons and phonons hybridize into mixed modes that can coherently exchange energy and information. In this talk, I will explain how magnon phonon coupling can be harnessed to enable long-distance, phase-coherent information transfer between spatially separated magnetic elements. Finally, I will discuss the role of these magnon–phonon hybrid systems in quantum information processing.