Spintronic artificial neurons are intriguing building blocks for energy efficient Neuromorphic Computing (NC). Nevertheless, most contemporary implementations rely on symmetry breaking external in plane magnetic fields (H_X) for neuron operation, which limits scalability and hardware practicality. We experimentally demonstrate an altermagnet/Synthetic Antiferromagnetic Coupling (SAF) based spintronic neuron that uses out of plane spin ({\sigma}_Z) polarized spin-splitting torque to eliminate the necessity of an external H_X. The neuron device also features intrinsic self-reset function facilitated by built-in exchange coupling. Furthermore, the proposed device is validated for Spiking Neural Network (SNN) applications by achieving test accuracies of 95.99% and 94.36% on the MNIST and N-MNIST datasets, respectively. These results demonstrate the hardware feasibility and compatibility of the proposed spintronic neuron, highlighting its potential for compact, scalable and energy-efficient neuromorphic computing systems.
@article{arxiv.2602.01874,
title = {Spin splitting torque enabled artificial neuron with self-reset via synthetic antiferromagnetic coupling},
author = {Badsha Sekh and Hasibur Rahaman and Ravi Shankar Verma and Ramu Maddu and Kesavan Jawahar and S. N. Piramanayagam},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.01874},
year = {2026}
}