Layer thickness dependence of the current-induced effective field vector in Ta|CoFeB|MgO.

By Junyeon Kim, J. Sinha, M. Hayashi, Michihiko Yamanouchi, Shunsuke Fukami, Tetsuhiro Suzuki, S. Mitani, Hideo Ohno. Nature Materials, 2012

864 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current-induced effective magnetic fields can provide efficient ways of electrically manipulating the magnetization of ultrathin magnetic heterostructures. Two effects, known as the Rashba spin orbit field and the spin Hall spin torque, have been reported to be responsible for the generation of the effective field. However, a quantitative understanding of the effective field, including its direction with respect to the current flow, is lacking. Here we describe vector measurements of the current-induced effective field in Ta|CoFeB|MgO heterostructrures. The effective field exhibits a significant dependence on the Ta and CoFeB layer thicknesses. In particular, a 1 nm thickness variation of the Ta layer can change the magnitude of the effective field by nearly two orders of magnitude. Moreover, its sign changes when the Ta layer thickness is reduced, indicating that there are two competing effects contributing to it. Our results illustrate that the presence of atomically thin metals can profoundly change the landscape for controlling magnetic moments in magnetic heterostructures electrically.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64a4bb4cc3eddb05337c93f4ecd360c950e50530

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Citations in the corpus

New perspectives for Rashba spin-orbit coupling. (2015, background): “Since then, a wealth of experimental investigations have revealed the complex nature of the SO torque in magnetic semiconductors [66] and metallic multilayers [68], [69], [70].”
Interface-Induced Phenomena in Magnetism (2016, neutral): “If this spin current is absorbed by the ferromagnet, it creates a spin-transfer torque (Ando et al., 2008; Liu et al., 2011; Liu, Lee et al., 2012; Liu, Pai, Li et al., 2012; Garello et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2013; Fan et al., 2014b).”
Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy at transition metal/oxide interfaces and applications (2017, background): “An important study shedding light on this discussionwas published by Kim et al. (2013).”
Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, methodology): “The different contributions have been investigated using semiclassical Boltzmann transport equation (van der Bijl and Duine, 2012; Kim et al., 2013b, 2012b; Lee et al., 2015; Manchon and Zhang, 2008; Matos-Abiague and Rodriguez-Suárez, 2009; Tan et al., 2007), or quantummechanical Kubo formula…”