C. Won

Tailoring the chirality of magnetic domain walls by interface engineering.

Contacting ferromagnetic films with normal metals changes how magnetic textures respond to electric currents, enabling surprisingly fast domain wall motions and spin texture-dependent propagation direction. These effects are attributed to domain wall chirality induced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction at interfaces, which suggests rich possibilities to influence domain wall dynamics if the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can be adjusted. Chiral magnetism was seen in several film structures on appropriately chosen substrates where interfacial spin-orbit-coupling effects are strong. Here we use real-space imaging to visualize chiral domain walls in cobalt/nickel multilayers in contact with platinum and iridium. We show that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can be adjusted to stabilize either left-handed or right-handed Néel walls, or non-chiral Bloch walls by adjusting an interfacial spacer layer between the multilayers and the substrate. Our findings introduce domain wall chirality as a new degree of freedom, which may open up new opportunities for spintronics device designs.

Unlocking Bloch-type chirality in ultrathin magnets through uniaxial strain

Chiral magnetic domain walls are of great interest because lifting the energetic degeneracy of left- and right-handed spin textures in magnetic domain walls enables fast current-driven domain wall propagation. Although two types of magnetic domain walls are known to exist in magnetic thin films, Bloch- and Néel-walls, up to now the stabilization of homochirality was restricted to Néel-type domain walls. Since the driving mechanism of thin-film magnetic chirality, the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, is thought to vanish in Bloch-type walls, homochiral Bloch walls have remained elusive. Here we use real-space imaging of the spin texture in iron/nickel bilayers on tungsten to show that chiral domain walls of mixed Bloch-type and Néel-type can indeed be stabilized by adding uniaxial strain in the presence of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. Our findings introduce Bloch-type chirality as a new spin texture, which may open up new opportunities to design spin-orbitronics devices.

Magnetic vortex generated by Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction

We demonstrate that a magnetic vortex generated by the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction is stable state in a spatially confined system. The properties of the locally confined magnetic vortex structure are investigated by performing Monte-Carlo simulations and theoretical calculations. The results reveal the relationship between the confinement size and the magnetic vortex size. We obtain the structural size of the most stable magnetic vortex as well as the critical size above which the magnetic vortex becomes unstable. The field required to flip the vortex core was estimated theoretically and compared with simulation results. The thermal stability of the magnetic vortex is also discussed.

Three-dimensional mapping of the anisotropic magnetoresistance in Fe3O4 single crystal thin films

The anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) effect with a magnetic field along arbitrary directions in single crystalline (001)-oriented Fe3O4 films was studied. A cubic symmetry term, an in-plane uniaxial term, and an out-of-plane uniaxial term could be quantitatively separated. The cubic term is independent of the current direction, and decreases with increasing temperature, but both in-plane and out-of-plane uniaxial terms are found to be strongly dependent on the current orientation. This three-dimensional magnetoresistance measurement provides a quantitative method for identifying the different contributions to the AMR effect.

Effect of Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction on magnetic vortex

The effect of the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya (DM) interaction on the vortex in magnetic microdisk was investigated by micro-magnetic simulation based on the Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation. Our results show that the DM interaction modifies the size of the vortex core, and also induces an out-of-plane magnetization component at the edge and inside the disk. The DM interaction can destabilizes one vortex handedness, generate a bias field to the vortex core and couple the vortex polarity and chirality. This DM-interaction-induced coupling can therefore provide a new way to control vortex polarity and chirality.

Out-of-plane chiral domain wall spin-structures in ultrathin in-plane magnets.

Chiral spin textures in ultrathin films, such as skyrmions or chiral domain walls, are believed to offer large performance advantages in the development of novel spintronics technologies. While in-plane magnetized films have been studied extensively as media for current- and field-driven domain wall dynamics with applications in memory or logic devices, the stabilization of chiral spin textures in in-plane magnetized films has remained rare. Here we report a phase of spin structures in an in-plane magnetized ultrathin film system where out-of-plane spin orientations within domain walls are stable. Moreover, while domain walls in in-plane films are generally expected to be non-chiral, we show that right-handed spin rotations are strongly favoured in this system, due to the presence of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction. These results constitute a platform to explore unconventional spin dynamics and topological phenomena that may enable high-performance in-plane spin-orbitronics devices.

Antiferromagnetic proximity effect in epitaxial CoO/NiO/MgO(001) systems

Magnetic proximity effect between two magnetic layers is an important focus of research for discovering new physical properties of magnetic systems. Antiferromagnets (AFMs) are fundamental systems with magnetic ordering and promising candidate materials in the emerging field of antiferromagnetic spintronics. However, the magnetic proximity effect between antiferromagnetic bilayers is rarely studied because detecting the spin orientation of AFMs is challenging. Using X-ray linear dichroism and magneto-optical Kerr effect measurements, we investigated antiferromagnetic proximity effects in epitaxial CoO/NiO/MgO(001) systems. We found the antiferromagnetic spin of the NiO underwent a spin reorientation transition from in-plane to out-of-plane with increasing NiO thickness, with the existence of vertical exchange spring spin alignment in thick NiO. More interestingly, the Néel temperature of the CoO layer was greatly enhanced by the adjacent NiO layer, with the extent of the enhancement closely dependent on the spin orientation of NiO layer. This phenomenon was attributed to different exchange coupling strengths at the AFM/AFM interface depending on the relative spin directions. Our results indicate a new route for modifying the spin configuration and ordering temperature of AFMs through the magnetic proximity effect near room temperature, which should further benefit the design of AFM spintronic devices.

Effect of interlayer exchange coupling on magnetic chiral structures

We numerically investigated the effect of interlayer exchange coupling on magnetic chiral structures, such as a helical/cycloidal spin structure and magnetic skyrmion crystal (SkX), which are produced in a magnetic system involving the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). We report the existence of a phase transition where the length scale of magnetic structure discontinuously changes, and that there can be a novel magnetic structure around the phase boundary that exhibits double-ordering lengths of magnetic structure. Therefore, the system has multiple ground phases determined by the ratio of interlayer exchange coupling strength and DMI strength. Furthermore, we investigated the critical condition of the external perpendicular field required for the SkX. The critical field is significantly reduced under the effect of interlayer exchange coupling, which can stabilize the SkX without the external field.

Magnetic vortex gyration affected by Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

The effect of the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) on magnetic vortex gyration is investigated systematically through micromagnetic simulations. Our results show that the DMI can lift the degeneracy of vortex gyration eigenfrequencies for vortices with left- and right-handedness. For vortex gyration excited by an in-plane AC resonant field, the DMI can strongly influence the gyration amplitude and the critical field for core switching, depending on the sign of the DMI and the vortex handedness. The DMI-induced edge state has a strong effect on the vortex core gyration as the core approaches the disk edge.

The spin structures of interlayer coupled magnetic films with opposite chirality

Using Monte-Carlo simulations and micromagnetic simulations, we reveal how the spin structural correlation and the skyrmion dynamics are affected by the interlayer coupling in a chiral magnetic bilayer system, in which the two layers have opposite chirality. The interaction through interlayer coupling between chiral magnetic structures influences the static and dynamics properties profoundly. The competition between the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and the interlayer interaction allows multiple magnetic structures to be energetically stable, which includes sole skyrmion states (skyrmion appears in only one of the layers) and skyrmion pair states (coupled skyrmions in top and bottom layers). When current driven spin transfer torques are applied to each state, the sole skyrmion state is mainly propelled by a spin transfer torque causing the skyrmion hall effect, but the skyrmion pair state is propelled by a torque from skyrmion-skyrmion interaction and not influenced by the skyrmion hall effect. Also upon application of an external magnetic field, we found the skyrmions in a skyrmion pair state extinguish in an exclusive way, as the annihilation of a skyrmion in one of the layers stabilizes the once paired skyrmion in the other layer, i.e. the skyrmion lattice sites have only one skyrmion in either layer.