Scientists Create New Magnetic State: The Magneto-Ionic Vortex (“Vortion”)

By Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona August 16, 2025

Collected at: https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-create-new-magnetic-state-the-magneto-ionic-vortex-vortion/

By controlling this state, researchers can enable the development of smarter, reconfigurable, and energy-efficient devices that function like the brain.

Researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have successfully created a new form of magnetic state known as a magneto-ionic vortex, or “vortion.” Their findings, published in Nature Communications, demonstrate an unprecedented ability to control magnetic properties at the nanoscale under normal room temperature conditions. This achievement could pave the way for next-generation magnetic technologies.

As the growth of Big Data continues, the energy needs of information technologies have risen sharply. In most systems, data is stored using electric currents, but this process generates excess heat and wastes energy. A more efficient approach is to control magnetic memory through voltage rather than current. Magneto-ionic materials make this possible by enabling their magnetic properties to be adjusted when ions are inserted or removed through voltage polarity changes. Up to now, research in this field has mainly focused on continuous films, instead of addressing the nanoscale “bits” that are vital for dense data storage.

At very small scales, unique magnetic behaviors can appear that are not seen in larger systems. One example is the magnetic vortex, a tiny whirlpool-like magnetic pattern. These structures play an important role in modern magnetic data recording and also have biomedical applications. However, once a vortex state is established in a material, it is usually very difficult to modify or requires significant amounts of energy to do so.

Combining Magneto-Ionics and Vortices

Researchers from the UAB Department of Physics, in collaboration with scientists from the ICMAB-CSIC, the ALBA Synchrotron and research institutions in Italy and the United States, propose a new solution that combines magneto-ionics and magnetic vortices. Researchers experimentally developed a new magnetic state that they have named magneto-ionic vortex, or “vortion.” This new object allows “on-demand” control of the magnetic properties of a nanodot (a dot of nanometric dimensions) with high precision. This is achieved by extracting nitrogen ions through the application of voltage, thus allowing for efficient control with very low energy consumption.

“This is a so far unexplored object at the nanoscale,” explains ICREA researcher in the UAB Department of Physics Jordi Sort, director of the research. “There is a great demand for controlling magnetic states at the nanoscale but, surprisingly, most of the research in magneto-ionics has so far focused on the study of films of continuous materials. If we look at the effects of ion displacement in discrete structures of nanometre dimensions, the ‘nanodots’ we have analysed, we see that very interesting dynamically evolving spin configurations appear, which are unique to these types of structures.”

These spin configurations and the magnetic properties of the vortices vary as a function of the duration of the applied voltage. Thus, different magnetic states (e.g., vortices with different properties or states with uniform magnetic orientation) can be generated from nanodots of an initially non-magnetic material by the gradual extraction of ions through the application of voltage.

“With the ‘vortions’ we developed, we can have unprecedented control of magnetic properties such as magnetisation, coercivity, remanence, anisotropy, or the critical fields at which vortions are formed or annihilated. These are fundamental properties for storing information in magnetic memories, which we are now able to control and tune in an analogue and reversible manner by a voltage-activated process with very low energy consumption,” explains Irena Spasojević, postdoctoral researcher in the UAB Department of Physics and first author of the paper. “The voltage actuation procedure, instead of using electric current, prevents heating in devices such as laptops, servers, and data centres, and it drastically reduces energy loss.”

Researchers have shown that by precisely controlling the thickness of the voltage-generated magnetic layer, the magnetic state of the material can be varied at will, in a controlled and reversible manner, between a non-magnetic state, a state with a uniform magnetic orientation (such as that found in a magnet), and the new magneto-ionic vortex state.

Ability to mimic the behaviour of neuronal synapses

This unprecedented level of control of magnetic properties at the nanoscale and at room temperature opens new horizons for the development of advanced magnetic devices with functionalities that can be tailored once the material has been synthesised. This provides greater flexibility which is needed to meet specific technological demands.

“We envision, for example, the integration of reconfigurable magneto-ionic vortices in neural networks as dynamic synapses, capable of mimicking the behaviour of biological synapses,” says Jordi Sort. In the brain, the connections between neurons, the synapses, have different weights (intensities) that adapt dynamically according to the activity and learning process. Similarly, “vortions” could provide tuneable neuronal synaptic weights, reflected in reconfigurable magnetisation or anisotropy values, for neuromorphic (brain-inspired) spintronic devices. In fact, “the activity of biological neurons and synapses is also controlled by electrical signals and ion migration, analogous to our magneto-ionic units,” comments Irena Spasojević.

Researchers believe that, besides their impact in brain-inspired devices, analogue computing or multi-state data storage systems, vortions may have other potential applications, including medical therapy techniques such as theragnostics, data security, magnetic spin computing devices (spin logics), and the generation of spin waves (magnonics).

Reference: “Magneto-ionic vortices: voltage-reconfigurable swirling-spin analog-memory nanomagnets” by Irena Spasojevic, Zheng Ma, Aleix Barrera, Federica Celegato, Alessandro Magni, Sandra Ruiz-Gómez, Michael Foerster, Anna Palau, Paola Tiberto, Kristen S. Buchanan and Jordi Sort, 26 February 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57321-8

The research, led by ICREA professor of the UAB Department of Physics Jordi Sort, and postdoctoral researcher of the UAB Department of Physics Irena Spasojević as the first author of the publication, also included Zheng Ma, from the same department, Aleix Barrera and Anna Palau, from the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), and researchers from the ALBA Synchrotron, the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRiM) of Turin, Italy, and Colorado State University, USA. The study was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications. This study was financed by the REMINDS project from the European Research Council.