Enhancement of Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy and Transmission of Spin-Hall-Effect-Induced Spin Currents by a Hf Spacer Layer in W/Hf/CoFeB/MgO Layer

By C. Pai, M. Nguyen, Carina A. Belvin, L. H. Vilela-Leão, D. Ralph, Robert A. Buhrman. 2014

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report that strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of the ferromagnetic layer in a W/CoFeB/MgO multilayer structure can be established by inserting a Hf layer as thin as 0.25 nm between the W and CoFeB layers. The Hf spacer also allows transmission of spin currents generated by an in-plane charge current in the W layer to apply strong spin torque on the CoFeB, thereby enabling current-driven magnetic switching. The antidamping-like and field-like components of the spin torque exerted on a 1 nm CoFeB layer are of comparable magnitudes in this geometry. Both components originate from the spin Hall effect in the underlying W layer.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/308db019bed13a85728bf64714120404b8fd6549

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Pietro Gambardella
2. J. Sinova
3. T. Jungwirth
4. A. Manchon
5. I. Miron
6. Kevin Garello
7. A. Thiaville
8. J. Železný

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Pietro Gambardella
2. J. Sinova
3. A. Thiaville
4. I. Miron
5. T. Jungwirth

Citations in the corpus

• Interface-Induced Phenomena in Magnetism (2016, unknown): “Experiments in which different types of spacer layers are placed between heavy metal and ferromagnet layers (Fan et al., 2013; Pai et al., 2014) suggest that the 3D spin Hall effect mechanism is the most likely explanation for the measured torque, but this needs to be modeled in more detail.”
• Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, background): “…intermixing of Pt/Co/AlOx (Garello et al., 2013) and Ta/CoFeB/MgO (Avci et al., 2014b), as well as upon the insertion of different spacer layers between the FM and the NM that is considered to be the main source of spin accumulation (Fan et al., 2013; Pai et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2015c).”
• Giant Spin Hall Effect and Switching Induced by Spin-Transfer Torque in a W / Co 40 Fe 40 B 20 / MgO Structure with Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy (2015, background): “It is the largest spin Hall angle among elemental solids with a large spin-orbit coupling [4–11,23,24].”