Current-driven dynamics of chiral ferromagnetic domain walls.

By S. Emori, U. Bauer, Sung-Min Ahn, E. Martínez, G. Beach. Nature Materials, 2013

1,616 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In most ferromagnets the magnetization rotates from one domain to the next with no preferred handedness. However, broken inversion symmetry can lift the chiral degeneracy, leading to topologically rich spin textures such as spin spirals and skyrmions through the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). Here we show that in ultrathin metallic ferromagnets sandwiched between a heavy metal and an oxide, the DMI stabilizes chiral domain walls (DWs) whose spin texture enables extremely efficient current-driven motion. We show that spin torque from the spin Hall effect drives DWs in opposite directions in Pt/CoFe/MgO and Ta/CoFe/MgO, which can be explained only if the DWs assume a Néel configuration with left-handed chirality. We directly confirm the DW chirality and rigidity by examining current-driven DW dynamics with magnetic fields applied perpendicular and parallel to the spin spiral. This work resolves the origin of controversial experimental results and highlights a new path towards interfacial design of spintronic devices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1934fae26708d5bddec68c9e754dfec0b211eac9

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Interface-Induced Phenomena in Magnetism (2016, positive): “This theory was verified experimentally by measuring the dependence of current-induced velocities [Emori et al., 2013; Ryu et al., 2013] and effective fields [Emori et al.”
Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, methodology): “soon confirmed by several groups using different magnetic stacks and NM substrates (Avci et al., 2012, 2014b; Emori et al., 2013; Pai et al., 2012; Yu et al., 2014b), as well as AFs (Fukami et al.”
A strategy for the design of skyrmion racetrack memories (2014, background): “ocess. The thermal field h th satisfies the following statistical properties: , ,, ,0 , ', ' ' ' th k th k th l kl h r t h r t h r t F t t r r (11) where k and l represent the Cartesian coordinates x, y, z. According to that, each component of h th h h h th x th”
The 2017 Magnetism Roadmap (2017, background): “Magnetostatic considerations alone would lead to a Bloch wall structure, but the presence of an interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) leads to chiral Néel walls that respond to interfacial spin–orbit torques [49].”
Ginzburg-Landau theory for skyrmions in inversion-symmetric magnets with competing interactions (2015, background): “[46] Satoru Emori, Uwe Bauer, Sung-Min Ahn, Eduardo Martinez, and Geoffrey S.”