No Arabic abstract
We use micro-focus Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy to study the effects of spin-orbit torque on thermal spin waves in almost angular-momentum compensated ferrimagnetic CoGd alloy films. The spin-orbit torque is produced by the electric current flowing in the Pt layer adjacent to CoGd. Both the ferromagnetic and the exchange modes are detected in our measurements. The intensity and the linewidth of the ferromagnetic mode are modified by the spin-orbit torque. In contrast, the properties of the exchange mode are unaffected by the spin-orbit torque. We also find that the frequencies and the linewidths of both modes are significantly modified by Joule heating, due to the strong temperature dependence of the magnetic properties of CoGd in the vicinity of angular momentum compensation point. Our results provide insight into the mechanisms that can enable the implementation of sub-THz magnetic nano-oscillators based on ferrimagnetic materials, as well as related effects in antiferromagnets.
We demonstrate a high-quality spin orbit torque nano-oscillator comprised of spin wave modes confined by the magnetic field by the strongly inhomogeneous dipole field of a nearby micromagnet. This approach enables variable spatial confinement and systematic tuning of magnon spectrum and spectral separations for studying the impact of multi-mode interactions on auto-oscillations. We find these dipole field-localized spin wave modes exhibit good characteristic properties as auto-oscillators--narrow linewidth and large amplitude--while persisting up to room temperature. We find that the linewidth of the lowest-lying localized mode is approximately proportional to temperature in good agreement with theoretical analysis of the impact of thermal fluctuations. This demonstration of a clean oscillator with tunable properties provides a powerful tool for understanding the fundamental limitations and linewidth contributions to improve future spin-Hall oscillators.
Magnetic skyrmion is a promising building block for developing information storage and computing devices. It can be stabilized in a ferromagnetic thin film with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). The moving ferromagnetic skyrmion may show the skyrmion Hall effect, that is, the skyrmion shows a transverse shift when it is driven by a spin current. Here, we numerically and theoretically study the current-driven dynamics of a ferromagnetic nanoscale skyrmion in the presence of the anisotropic DMI, where the skyrmion has an elliptical shape. The skyrmion Hall effect of the elliptical skyrmion is investigated. It is found that the skyrmion Hall angle can be controlled by tuning the profile of elliptical skyrmion. Our results reveal the relation between the skyrmion shape and the skyrmion Hall effect, which could be useful for building skyrmion-based spintronic devices with preferred skyrmion Hall angle. Also, our results provide a method for the minimization of skyrmion Hall angle for applications based on in-line motion of skyrmions.
We present an {it ab initio}-based theoretical framework which elucidates the origin of the spin-orbit torque (SOT) in Normal-Metal(NM)/Ferromagnet(FM) heterostructures. The SOT is decomposed into two contributions, namely, {it spin-Hall} and the {it spin-orbital} components. We find that {it (i)} the Field-Like (FL) SOT is dominated by the spin-orbital component and {it (ii)} both components contribute to the damping-like torque with comparable magnitude in the limit of thick Pt film. The contribution of the spin-orbital component to the DL-SOT is present only for NMs with strong SOC coupling strength. We demonstrate that the FL-SOT can be expressed in terms of the non-equilibrium spin-resolved orbital moment accumulation. The calculations reveal that the experimentally reported oxygen-induced sign-reversal of the FL-SOT in Pt/Co bilayers is due to the significant reduction of the majority-spin orbital moment accumulation on the interfacial NM atoms.
Spin-dependent transport phenomena due to relativistic spin-orbit coupling and broken space-inversion symmetry are often difficult to interpret microscopically, in particular when occurring at surfaces or interfaces. Here we present a theoretical and experimental study of spin-orbit torque and unidirectional magnetoresistance in a model room-temperature ferromagnet NiMnSb with inversion asymmetry in the bulk of this half-heusler crystal. Besides the angular dependence on magnetization, the competition of Rashba and Dresselhaus-like spin-orbit couplings results in the dependence of these effects on the crystal direction of the applied electric field. The phenomenology that we observe highlights potential inapplicability of commonly considered approaches for interpreting experiments. We point out that, in general, there is no direct link between the current-induced non-equilibrium spin polarization inferred from the measured spin-orbit torque and the unidirectional magnetiresistance. We also emphasize that the unidirectional magnetoresistance has not only longitudinal but also transverse components in the electric field -- current indices which complicates its separation from the thermoelectric contributions to the detected signals in common experimental techniques. We use the theoretical results to analyze our measurements of the on-resonance and off-resonance mixing signals in microbar devices fabricated from an epitaxial NiMnSb film along different crystal directions. Based on the analysis we extract an experimental estimate of the unidirectional magnetoresistance in NiMnSb.
We investigate the influence of magnons on the temperature-dependence and the anisotropy of the spin-orbit torque (SOT). For this purpose we use 3rd order perturbation theory in the framework of the Keldysh formalism in order to derive suitable equations to compute the magnonic SOT. We find several contributions to the magnonic SOT, which depend differently on the spin-wave stiffness $mathcal{A}$ and on the temperature $T$, with the dominating contribution scaling like $T^{2}/mathcal{A}^{2}$. Based on this formalism we compute the magnonic SOT in the ferromagnetic Rashba model. For large Rashba parameters the magnonic SOT is strongly anisotropic and for small quasiparticle broadening it may become larger than the non-magnonic SOT.