Reconfiguring artificial spin-ice microstate via spin-orbit torque

Artificial spin ices (ASI), a widely used platform to study emergent collective magnetization phenomena, are arrays of strongly interacting magnetic nano-islands [1,2]. Here, we simulate the string-like magnetization reversal in an artificial spin ice (ASI) system by applying spin–orbit torque (SOT) to one element in the array. For this purpose, we employ the GPU-accelerated micromagnetic simulations platform MuMax3. We observe a transition from two-dimensional (2D) random to one-dimensional (1D) string-like SOT-induced magnetization reversals as the bias magnetic field is reduced from the collective reversal field determined by the hysteresis loop. We further find that the SOT-triggered 1D avalanche length and its direction can be tuned by varying the bias field’s strength and direction, respectively. Moreover, we observe that local minima in the total energy limit the magnetization reversal length. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of an energy-efficient on-chip compatible approach for reconfiguring ASI necessary for next-generation magnonic reservoir computing.

Reference

[1] Sultana, R. et al. (2025), J. Appl. Phys. 138, 061101.

[2] Heyderman, L. J. & Stamps, R. L. (2013), J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 25, 363201.