No Arabic abstract
Despite oxides and some fluorides perovskites have emerged as prototypes of multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials, they have not impacted real devices. Unfortunately, their working temperatures are very low and the magnetoelectric coupling has been reported to be rather small. Herewith, we report from first-principles calculations an ideal magnetization reversal through polarization switching in BaCuF$_4$ which, according to our results, could be achieved close to room temperature. We also show that this ideal coupling is driven by a soft mode that combines both, polarization and octahedral rotation. The later being directly coupled to the weak ferromagnetism of BaCuF$_4$. This, added to its strong Jahn-Teller distortion and its orbital ordering, makes this material as a very appealing prototype for crystals in the $ABX_4$ family in multifunctional applications.
Magnetic materials with giant saturation magnetization have been a holy grail for magnetic researchers and condensed matter physicists for decades because of its great scientific and technological impacts. As described by the famous Slater-Pauling curve the material with highest Ms is the Fe65Co35 alloy. This was challenged in 1972 by a report on the compound Fe16N2 with Ms much higher than that of Fe65Co35. Following this claim, there have been enormous efforts to reproduce this result and to understand the magnetism of this compound. However, the reported Ms by different groups cover a broad range, mainly due to the unavailability of directly assessing Ms in Fe16N2. In this article, we report a direct observation of the giant saturation magnetization up to 2500 emu/cm3 using polarized neutron reflectometry (PNR) in epitaxial constrained Fe16N2 thin films prepared using a low-energy and surface-plasma-free sputtering process. The observed giant Ms is corroborated by a previously proposed Cluster + Atom model, the characteristic feature of which, namely, the directional charge transfer is evidenced by polarization-dependent x-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES).
We show experimentally through time-resolved conductance measurements that magnetization reversal through domain wall motion in sub-100 nm diameter magnetic tunnel junctions is dominated by two distinct stochastic effects. The first involves the incubation time related to domain wall nucleation, while the second results from stochastic motion in the Walker regime. Micromagnetics simulations reveal several contributions to temporal pinning of the wall near the disk center, including Bloch point nucleation and wall precession. We show that a reproducible ballistic motion is recovered when Bloch and Neel wall profiles become degenerate in energy in optimally sized disks, which enables quasi-deterministic motion.
MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ (MBT) materials are promising antiferromagnetic topological insulators where field driven ferromagnetism is predicted to cause a transition between axion insulator and Weyl semimetallic states. However, the presence of antiferromagnetic coupling between Mn/Bi antisite defects and the main Mn layer can reduce the low-field magnetization, and it has been shown that such defects are more prevalent in the structurally identical trivial magnetic insulator MnSb$_2$Te$_4$ (MST). We use high-field magnetization measurements to show that the magnetization of MBT and MST occur in stages and full saturation requires fields of~$sim$~60 Tesla. As a consequence, the low-field magnetization plateau state in MBT, where many determinations of quantum anomalous Hall state are studied, actually consists of ferrimagnetic septuple blocks containing both a uniform and staggered magnetization component.
The structural and magnetic properties of a series of superlattices consisting of two ferromagnetic metals La$_{0.7}$Sr$_{0.3}$MnO$_3$ (LSMO) and SrRuO$_3$ (SRO) grown on (001) oriented SrTiO$_3$ are studied. Superlattices with a fixed LSMO layer thickness of 20 unit cells (u.c.) and varying SRO layer thickness show a sudden drop in magnetization on cooling through temperature where both LSMO and SRO layers are ferromagnetic. This behavior suggests an antiferromagnetic coupling between the layers. In addition, the samples having thinner SRO layers (n TEXTsymbol{<} 6) exhibit enhanced saturation magnetization at 10 K. These observations are attributed to the possible modification in the stereochemistry of the Ru and Mn ions in the interfacial region.
We have used time-resolved x-ray photoemission electron microscopy to investigate the magnetization dynamics induced by nanosecond current pulses in NiFe/Cu/Co nanostripes. A large tilt of the NiFe magnetization in the direction transverse to the stripe is observed during the pulses. We show that this effect cannot be quantitatively understood from the amplitude of the Oersted field and the shape anisotropy. High frequency oscillations observed at the onset of the pulses are attributed to precessional motion of the NiFe magnetization about the effective field. We discuss the possible origins of the large magnetization tilt and the potential implications of the static and dynamic effects of the Oersted field on current-induced domain wall motion in such stripes.