Switching of perpendicular magnetization by spin-orbit torques in the absence of external magnetic fields.

By Guoqiang Yu, P. Upadhyaya, Yabin Fan, Juan G. Alzate, Wanjun Jiang, Kin L. Wong, S. Takei, S. Bender, Li-Te Chang, Ying Jiang and 6 more. Nature Nanotechnology, 2013

973 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetization switching by current-induced spin-orbit torques is of great interest due to its potential applications in ultralow-power memory and logic devices. The switching of ferromagnets with perpendicular magnetization is of particular technological relevance. However, in such materials, the presence of an in-plane external magnetic field is typically required to assist spin-orbit torque-driven switching and this is an obstacle for practical applications. Here, we report the switching of out-of-plane magnetized Ta/Co(20)Fe(60)B(20)/TaO(x) structures by spin-orbit torques driven by in-plane currents, without the need for any external magnetic fields. This is achieved by introducing a lateral structural asymmetry into our devices, which gives rise to a new field-like spin-orbit torque when in-plane current flows in these structures. The direction of the current-induced effective field corresponding to this field-like spin-orbit torque is out-of-plane, facilitating the switching of perpendicular magnets.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81dd2f73f1fdbb303def444123ee8feeb20791f2

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Skyrmions in magnetic multilayers (2017, background): “Consequently, it gives rise to currentinduced spin-orbit torques (SOTs), including field like torque and anti-damping like torque [69, 151, 179-183].”
Perpendicular-anisotropy magnetic tunnel junction switched by spin-Hall-assisted spin-transfer torque (2015, methodology): “To avoid the use of magnetic field, in [18] the lateral asymmetry-breaking is proposed to achieve current-induced switching of perpendicular magnetization by only an in-plane current, but it requires advanced process for fabricating a film of varying thickness.”
Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, methodology): “Thickness gradients of the oxide and FM layers have been shown to induce an out-of-plane FL torque (Yu et al., 2014a,b) or a tilted anisotropy (Torrejon et al., 2015; You et al., 2015), both conducive to zero field switching, whereas independent patterning of the magnetic and conductive layers has…”