No Arabic abstract
We examine the atomic intermixing phenomenon in three distinct amorphous CoB-based multilayer thin film platforms - Pt/CoB/Ir, Ir/CoB/Pt and Pt/CoB/MgO - which are shown to stabilise room-temperature chiral magnetic textures. Intermixing occurs predominantly between adjacent metallic layers. Notably, it is stack-order dependent, and particularly extensive when Ir sits atop CoB. Intermixing induced variations in magnetic properties are ascribed to the formation of magnetic dead layer arising from CoIr alloying in the metallic stacks. It also produces systematic variations in saturation magnetization, by as much as 30%, across stacks. Crucially, the resulting crossover CoB thickness for the transition from perpendicular to in-plane magnetic anisotropy differs by more than 2x across the stacks. Finally, with thermal annealing treatment over moderate temperatures of 150-300 degree Celsius, the magnetic anisotropy increases monotonically across all stacks, coupled with discernibly larger Hc for the metallic stacks. These are attributed to thermally induced CoPt alloying and MgO crystallization in the metallic and oxide stacks, respectively. Remarkably, the CoB in the Pt/CoB/MgO stacks retains its amorphous nature after annealing. Our results set the stage for harnessing the collective attributes of amorphous CoB-based material platforms and associated annealing processes for modulating magnetic interactions, enabling the tuning of chiral magnetic texture properties in ambient conditions.
Competing interactions produce finite-size textures in myriad condensed matter systems, typically forming elongated stripe or round bubble domains. Transitions between stripe and bubble phases, driven by field or temperature, are expected to be reversible in nature. Here we report on the distinct character of the analogous transition for nanoscale spin textures in chiral Co/Pt-based multilayer films, known to host N{e}el skyrmions, using microscopy, magnetometry, and micromagnetic simulations. Upon increasing field, individual stripes fission into multiple skyrmions, and this transition exhibits a macroscopic signature of irreversibility. Crucially, upon field reversal, the skyrmions do not fuse back into stripes, with many skyrmions retaining their morphology down to zero field. Both the macroscopic irreversibility and the microscopic zero-field skyrmion density are governed by the thermodynamic material parameter determining chiral domain stability. These results establish the thermodynamic and microscopic framework underlying ambient skyrmion generation and stability in chiral multilayer films and provide immediate directions for their functionalization in devices.
Recent development of the magnetic material engineering led to achievement of the systems with a high interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). As a result, the formation of non-collinear magnetic soliton states or nonreciprocal spin wave dynamics is achievable. Typically used materials are based on bi-layers Heavy Metal/Ferromagnet, e.g., Pt/Co. These layers are characterized not only by a strong DMI, but also by the spin pumping effect and the resulting relatively large damping. Here, we show that the considerable interfacial DMI can be also present in bi-layers based on Ru/Co, characterized with low spin pumping effect and low damping. It is therefore a good candidate for the dynamical studies and implementations of chiral DMI. It is demonstrated by theoretical calculations that the value of DMI can be strongly affected and controlled by the strain of the lattice. We show a systematic experimental and theoretical comparison of magnetic material parameters between Pt/Co and Ru/Co bi-layers as a deserving candidate for spintronic and spin-orbitronic applications.
We report the experimental observation of strong electrical magneto-chiral anistropy (eMChA) in trigonal tellurium (t-Te) crystals. We introduce the tensorial character of the effect and determine several tensor elements and we propose a novel intrinsic bandstructure-based mechanism for eMChA which gives a reasonable description of the principal results.
Transport and magnetic properties of LSMO manganite thin films and bicrystal junctions were investigated. Manganite films were epitaxially grown on STO, LAO, NGO and LSAT substrates and their magnetic anisotropy were determined by two techniques of magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Compare with cubic substrates a small (about 0.3 persentage), the anisotropy of the orthorhombic NGO substrate leads to a uniaxial anisotropy of the magnetic properties of the films in the plane of the substrate. Samples with different tilt of crystallographic basal planes of manganite as well as bicrystal junctions with rotation of the crystallographic axes (RB - junction) and with tilting of basal planes (TB - junction) were investigated. It was found that on vicinal NGO substrates the value of magnetic anisotropy could be varied by changing the substrate inclination angle from 0 to 25 degrees. Measurement of magnetic anisotropy of manganite bicrystal junction demonstrated the presence of two ferromagnetically ordered spin subsystems for both types of bicrystal boundaries RB and TB. The magnitude of the magnetoresistance for TB - junctions increased with decreasing temperature and with the misorientation angle even misorientation of easy axes in the parts of junction does not change. Analysis of the voltage dependencies of bicrystal junction conductivity show that the low value of the magnetoresistance for the LSMO bicrystal junctions can be caused by two scattering mechanisms with the spin- flip of spin - polarized carriers due to the strong electron - electron interactions in a disordered layer at the bicrystal boundary at low temperatures and the spin-flip by anti ferromagnetic magnons at high temperatures.
We demonstrate that chiral skyrmionic magnetization configurations can be found as the minimum energy state in B20 thin film materials with easy-plane magnetocrystalline anisotropy with an applied magnetic field perpendicular to the film plane. Our observations contradict results from prior analytical work, but are compatible with recent experimental investigations. The size of the observed skyrmions increases with the easy-plane magnetocrystalline anisotropy. We use a full micromagnetic model including demagnetization and a three-dimensional geometry to find local energy minimum (metastable) magnetization configurations using numerical damped time integration. We explore the phase space of the system and start simulations from a variety of initial magnetization configurations to present a systematic overview of anisotropy and magnetic field parameters for which skyrmions are metastable and global energy minimum (stable) states.