Additive interfacial chiral interaction in multilayers for stabilization of small individual skyrmions at room temperature.

By C. Moreau-Luchaire, C. Moutafis, N. Reyren, J. Sampaio, C. Vaz, N. V. Horne, K. Bouzehouane, K. Garcı́a, C. Deranlot, P. Warnicke and 6 more. Nature Nanotechnology, 2016

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Facing the ever-growing demand for data storage will most probably require a new paradigm. Nanoscale magnetic skyrmions are anticipated to solve this issue as they are arguably the smallest spin textures in magnetic thin ﬁlms in nature. We designed cobalt-based multilayered thin ﬁlms in which the cobalt layer is sandwiched between two heavy metals and so provides additive interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMIs), which reach a value close to 2 mJ m(-2) in the case of the Ir|Co|Pt asymmetric multilayers. Using a magnetization-sensitive scanning X-ray transmission microscopy technique, we imaged small magnetic domains at very low fields in these multilayers. The study of their behaviour in a perpendicular magnetic ﬁeld allows us to conclude that they are actually magnetic skyrmions stabilized by the large DMI. This discovery of stable sub-100 nm individual skyrmions at room temperature in a technologically relevant material opens the way for device applications in the near future.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2254c0f194ce0aa3adada1c309b9840c6089d874

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Physical foundations and basic properties of magnetic skyrmions (2020, background): “The evolution of magnetic skyrmions in an applied field and the role of disorder in their stability and dynamics, encouraged intensive efforts on the synthesis of composite materials and the design of devices for prospective applications [36-42].”
Spin insulatronics (2020, background): “non-centrosymmetric compounds [60], but the community rapidly realized that we could generate them in metallic multilayers with broken inversion symmetry [61, 62, 63].”
Skyrmion Hall effect revealed by direct time-resolved X-ray microscopy (2016, methodology): “One of the most interesting spin structures that originates from this type of material is the magnetic skyrmion.(3,4,10,11) This topologically non-trivial, particle-like structure exhibits very interesting properties, such as topological stabilization and predicted efficient current-induced motion.”