Magnetologic with alpha-MnAs thin films

Taking advantage of the spin information in present day computing is expected to yield an enormous increase in efficiency. A promising ferromagnetic material compatible with semiconductors for room temperature applications is MnAs. By sensitive cantilever beam magnetometry, we discovered that alpha-MnAs films on GaAs(001) exhibit an additional small out-of-plane component of the magnetization which is magnetically coupled with the dominant in-plane magnetization. We demonstrate that by regarding the two components as independent inputs, the alpha-MnAs layer can be utilized as a logic gate with nonvolatile output. The logic functionality of the layer can be preselected to be AND or OR at run time, thus offering the perspective for programmable magnetologic devices.