News 2025

In a highly competitive process, the Excellence Commission and German Research Foundation (DFG) have selected our proposal for the new Cluster of Excellence EXC3112 "Center for Chiral Electronics" to receive funding for initially seven years starting in January 2026.

Together with our strong partners at Martin-Luther-Universit?t Halle-Wittenberg, Freie Universit?t Berlin, and the Max Planck Institue of Microstructure Physics in?Halle, we will explore the yet little-used chiral properties of condensed matter to design the next generation of energy-efficient electronics.?

We are thrilled that our Spintronics Group at UR will be part of this exciting journey and look forward to many fascinating discoveries ahead!

Spin–orbit coupling is an interaction that is fundamental to many phenomena in solid-state physics and, most interestingly from the application point of view, particularly well controllable in two-dimensional materials and van der Waals heterostructures. Our Technical Review provides a step-by-step introduction on how to determine the physically relevant SOC parameters in two-dimensional materials from first-principles methods.

Our Technical Review has been published in Nature Reviews Physics.

Together with colleagues from Sendai, we are proposing a new type of supercurrent diode effect – termed unconventional supercurrent diode effect – as a highly sensitive probe of interfacial chiral spin-orbit fields in vertical superconductor/ferromagnet/superconductor Josephson junctions.

Our results have been published in the Letter section of Physical Review B.

Our group has shown a comprehensive presence at the DPG Spring Meeting in Regensburg (March 2025) showcasing our work on spin-orbit torques, the unconventional Josephson supercurrent diode effect, altermagnet/superconductor/altermagnet junctions, as well as our first-principles studies of radial Rashba spin-orbit coupling in twisted heterostructures.

The schedule with our group's contributions can be looked up here.

After predicting that the competition between conventional and chiral spin-orbit fields in Josephson junctions can lead to the unconventional supercurrent diode effect (see below), we are exploring fundamental ways to disentangle both types of spin-orbit coupling in real materials from transport measurements focusing at single-interface ferromagnet/superconductor junctions and also addressing interference with hypothetic Dresselhaus interactions.

Our article has been published in Physical Review B.

The organizers have invited Dr. Andreas Costa to showcase our theoretical studies on the Josephson supercurrent diode effect at the first Heraeus-Lorentz workshop "Superconductivity in symmetry-broken and low-dimensional systems" in Leiden.

More information on the workshop here.