No Arabic abstract
Antiferromagnetic materials are of great interest for spintronics. Here we present a comprehensive study of the growth, structural characterization, and resulting magnetic properties of thin films of the non-collinear antiferromagnet Mn$_{3}$Ir. Using epitaxial engineering on MgO (001) and Al$_{2}$O$_{3}$ (0001) single crystal substrates, we control the growth of cubic ${gamma}$-Mn$_{3}$Ir in both (001) and (111) crystal orientations, and discuss the optimization of growth conditions to achieve high-quality crystal structures with low surface roughness. Exchange bias is studied in bilayers, with exchange bias fields as large as -29 mT (equivalent to a unidirectional anisotropy constant of 11.5 nJ cm$^{-2}$) measured in Mn$_{3}$Ir (111) / permalloy heterostructures at room temperature. In addition, a distinct dependence of blocking temperature on in-plane crystallographic direction in Mn$_{3}$Ir (001) / Py bilayers is observed. These findings are discussed in the context of chiral antiferromagnetic domain structures, and will inform progress towards topological antiferromagnetic spintronic devices.
The growth and characterization of epitaxial Co3O4(111) films grown by oxygen plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy on single crystalline a-Al2O3(0001) is reported. The Co3O4(111) grows single crystalline with the epitaxial relation Co3O4(111)[-12-1]||a-Al2O3(0001)[10-10], as determined from in situ electron diffraction. Film stoichiometry is confirmed by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, while ex situ x-ray diffraction measurements show that the Co3O4 films are fully relaxed. Post-growth annealing induces significant modifications in the film morphology, including a sharper Co3O4/a-Al2O3 interface and improved surface crystallinity, as shown by x-ray reflectometry, atomic force microscopy and electron diffraction measurements. Despite being polar, the surface of both as-grown and annealed Co3O4(111) films are (1 * 1), which can be explained in terms of inversion in the surface spinel structure.
We have combined neutron scattering and piezoresponse force microscopy to study the relation between the exchange bias observed in CoFeB/BiFeO3 heterostructures and the multiferroic domain structure of the BiFeO3 films. We show that the exchange field scales with the inverse of the ferroelectric and antiferromagnetic domain size, as expected from Malozemoffs model of exchange bias extended to multiferroics. Accordingly, polarized neutron reflectometry reveals the presence of uncompensated spins in the BiFeO3 film at the interface with the CoFeB. In view of these results we discuss possible strategies to switch the magnetization of a ferromagnet by an electric field using BiFeO3.
We have studied the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in strained thin films of the frustrated antiferromagnet Mn$_{3}$NiN. The AHE does not follow the conventional relationships with magnetization or longitudinal conductivity and is enhanced relative to that expected from the magnetization in the antiferromagnetic state below $T_{mathrm{N}} = 260$,K. This enhancement is consistent with origins from the non-collinear antiferromagnetic structure, as the latter is closely related to that found in Mn$_{3}$Ir and Mn$_{3}$Pt where a large AHE is induced by the Berry curvature. As the Berry phase induced AHE should scale with spin-orbit coupling, yet larger AHE may be found in other members of the chemically flexible Mn$_{3}A$N structure.
Antiferromagnetic spintronic devices have the potential to outperform conventional ferromagnetic devices due to their ultrafast dynamics and high data density. A challenge in designing these devices is the control and detection of the orientation of the anti-ferromagnet. One of the most promising ways to achieve this is through the exchange bias effect. This is of particular importance in large scale multigranular devices. Due to the large system sizes, previously, only micromagnetic simulations have been possible, these have an assumed distribution of antiferromagnetic anisotropy directions. Here, we use an atomistic model where the distribution of antiferromagnetic anisotropy directions occurs naturally and the exchange bias occurs due to the intrinsic disorder in the antiferromagnet. We perform large scale simulations, generating realistic values of exchange bias. We find a strong temperature dependance of the exchange bias, which approaches zero at the blocking temperature while the coercivity has a peak at the blocking temeprature due to the superparamagnetic flipping of the antiferromagnet during the hysteresis loop. We find a large discrepancy between the exchange bias predicted from a geometric model of the antiferromagnetic interface indicating the importance of grain edge effects in multigranular exchange biased systems. The grain size dependence shows the expected peak due to a competition between the superparamagnetic nature of small grains and reduction in the statistical imbalance in the number of interfacial spins for larger grain sizes. Our simulations confirm the existence of single antiferromagnetic domains within each grain. The model gives insights into the physical origin of exchange bias and provides a route to developing optimised nanoscale antiferromagnetic spintronic devices.
We report on Cr doping effect in Mn3Sn polycrystalline films with both uniform and modulation doping. It is found that Cr doping with low concentration does not cause notable changes to the structural and magnetic properties of Mn3Sn, but it significantly enhances the anomalous Hall conductivity, particularly for modulation-doped samples at low temperature. A Hall conductivity as high as 184.8 {Omega}-1 cm-1 is obtained for modulation-doped samples at 50 K, in a sharp contrast to vanishingly small values for undoped samples at the same temperature. We attribute the enhancement to the change of Fermi level induced by Cr doping