Recent developments on MnN for spintronic applications

There is significant interest worldwide to identify new antiferromagnetic materials suitable for device applications. Key requirements for such materials are: relatively high magnetocrystalline anisotropy constant, low cost, high corrosion resistance and the ability to induce a large ex-change bias, i.e. loop shift, when grown adjacent to a ferromagnetic layer. In this article, a review on recent developments on the novel antiferromagnetic material MnN is presented. This material shows potential as a replacement for the commonly used antiferromagnet of choice, i.e. IrMn. Although the results so far look promising, further work is required for the optimisation of this material.