Hong Xu

Magnetic thin films underpin modern data storage, sensing, and on-chip microwave technologies, and reconfiguration of their magnetic properties plays a vital role. Emerging low-power, tightly integrated architectures motivate complementary control modalities with minimal thermal overhead. Strain offers a low-dissipation route for magnetic control because lattice deformation can modify exchange interactions and spin–orbit-coupled anisotropy without requiring sustained charge transport. We summarize magnetoelastic coupling, piezomagnetism, and flexomagnetism and then compare strain delivery from piezoelectric substrate to epitaxial mismatch, flexible substrate engineering, and surface acoustic waves. We mainly focus on tunable outputs of ordering temperatures, magnetization and reversal, anisotropy and resonance dynamics, and domain structures, with additional concern on spin–orbit torques and altermagnetism, aiming to provide design guidelines for next-generation low-power spintronic and magnetoelectronic devices.

Equiatomic B2-ordered FeRh alloy possesses unique metamagnetic phase transition above room temperature, which provides a promising route for emerging magnetic recording and spintronic applications when downsized into nanoscale. This paper presents a systematic investigation of magnetic domain in single crystal FeRh films patterned into nanoscale stripe, ring, and circle geometries to explore the evolution of involved transition behavior and magnetic anisotropy. When the characteristic size of the patterns approaches 100 nm, a pronounced supercooling phenomenon occurs; particularly in the circle patterns, the supercooling degree exceeds 15 K. This finding reveals a suppression of the conventional heterogeneity-driven antiferromagnetic nucleation mechanism by dimensional confinement related to the pattern area. Concurrently, the dimensional confinement reduces the demagnetization energy, which enables ferromagnetic FeRh to maintain robust perpendicular magnetic anisotropy up to 390 K and across a wide temperature window of 45 K. Our work not only provides a deep insight into the metamagnetic phase transition mechanism at nanoscale but also is beneficial for realizing novel device functionalities utilizing nanosized FeRh.