Field-free current-induced magnetization switching of a room temperature van der Waals magnet for neuromorphic computing

Spin orbit torque (SOT) has become a promising approach to efficiently manipulate the magnetization switching in spintronic devices. As a main factor to impact the device performance, the high quality interface is essentially desired, which can be readily acquired by using the two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials. Recently, a 2D ferromagnetic material Fe3GaTe2 has been discovered to possess the above-room-temperature Curie temperature and strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), providing an excellent candidate to build spintronic devices. On the other hand, an external magnetic field is necessary for the SOT-driven deterministic switching of perpendicular magnetization, which has become a block for the real applications. Here, we realize the field-free SOT switching of Fe3GaTe2 at room temperature based on the Fe3GaTe2/MnPt heterostructure. In addition, inspired by the superiority of 2D materials in 3D heterogeneous integration, we explore the potential of our device in the computing in memory (CIM). With the application of the current pulses, the gradual switching of our device at zero field imitates the function of artificial synapse in the convolutional neural network (CNN), achieving a high accuracy (~92.8%) pattern recognition. Our work proposes a feasible solution for field-free SOT switching in 2D vdW spintronic devices, which paves the way for applications in magnetic memory and neuromorphic computing.