We characterize the nanosecond pulse-switching performance of three-terminal magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) driven by the spin Hall effect (SHE), which persists at cryogenic temperatures owing to the considerable assistive torque from the Oersted field. These SHE MTJ devices can be switched by current pulses as short as 1 ns with current densities $<{10}^{12}\mathrm{A}/{\mathrm{m}}^2$, exceeding expectations from conventional macrospin models. Furthermore, the pulse-switching bit-error rates remain below ${10}^{-6}$ for <10 ns pulses. With a realistic cryogenic memory cell in mind, we show that similar performance is achieved with exponentially decaying pulses expected to be delivered to the SHE MTJ device by a nanocryotron device in a parallel configuration. These results suggest the viability of the SHE MTJ structure as an element for high-performance general-purpose or application-specific superconducting computing systems.

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• Magnetization switching
• Spin Hall effect
• Spintronics
• Magnetic tunnel junctions
• Superconducting devices
• Cryogenics