Long-range chiral exchange interaction in synthetic antiferromagnets

Autor: Tae-Wan Kim, Dong-Soo Han, Henk J. M. Swagten, Woosuk Yoo, Kyoung-Whan Kim, Jan-Philipp Hanke, Reinoud Lavrijsen, Myung-Hwa Jung, Kyujoon Lee, Youri L. W. van Hees, Yuriy Mokrousov, Mathias Kläui, Chun-Yeol You
Přispěvatelé: Physics of Nanostructures
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Nature Materials, 18(7), 703-708. Nature Publishing Group
Nature materials 18, 703–708 (2019). doi:10.1038/s41563-019-0370-z
ISSN: 1476-4660
1476-1122
DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0370-z
Popis: The exchange interaction governs static and dynamic magnetism. This fundamental interaction comes in two flavours-symmetric and antisymmetric. The symmetric interaction leads to ferro- and antiferromagnetism, and the antisymmetric interaction has attracted significant interest owing to its major role in promoting topologically non-trivial spin textures that promise fast, energy-efficient devices. So far, the antisymmetric exchange interaction has been found to be rather short ranged and limited to a single magnetic layer. Here we report a long-range antisymmetric interlayer exchange interaction in perpendicularly magnetized synthetic antiferromagnets with parallel and antiparallel magnetization alignments. Asymmetric hysteresis loops under an in-plane field reveal a unidirectional and chiral nature of this interaction, which results in canted magnetic structures. We explain our results by considering spin-orbit coupling combined with reduced symmetry in multilayers. Our discovery of a long-range chiral interaction provides an additional handle to engineer magnetic structures and could enable three-dimensional topological structures.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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