Symmetry and magnitude of spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic heterostructures.

By Kevin Garello, I. Miron, C. Avci, F. Freimuth, Y. Mokrousov, S. Blügel, S. Auffret, Olivier Boulle, Gilles Gaudin, Pietro Gambardella. Nature Nanotechnology, 2013

1,170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent demonstrations of magnetization switching induced by in-plane current injection in heavy metal/ferromagnetic heterostructures have drawn increasing attention to spin torques based on orbital-to-spin momentum transfer. The symmetry, magnitude and origin of spin-orbit torques (SOTs), however, remain a matter of debate. Here we report on the three-dimensional vector measurement of SOTs in AlOx/Co/Pt and MgO/CoFeB/Ta trilayers using harmonic analysis of the anomalous and planar Hall effects. We provide a general scheme to measure the amplitude and direction of SOTs as a function of the magnetization direction. Based on space and time inversion symmetry arguments, we demonstrate that heavy metal/ferromagnetic layers allow for two different SOTs having odd and even behaviour with respect to magnetization reversal. Such torques include strongly anisotropic field-like and spin transfer-like components, which depend on the type of heavy metal layer and annealing treatment. These results call for SOT models that go beyond the spin Hall and Rashba effects investigated thus far.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/151b16080a7e846b161011a9de859b9a05972cd4

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Citations in the corpus

Giant orbital Hall effect and orbital-to-spin conversion in 3d, 5d, and 4f metallic heterostructures (2022, methodology): “Current-induced spin-orbit torques were quantified by the harmonic Hall voltage method [40] using angle-scan measurements [51].”
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].”
Magnetism, symmetry and spin transport in van der Waals layered systems (2021, neutral): “In general, H soc can be written in terms of the current and magnetization 139,150–152 .”
Spin-dependent phenomena and device concepts explored in (Ga,Mn)As (2013, background): “An intense discussion has ensued on the alternative, SHE-STT based or SOT based interpretations of these in-plane current induced spin reorientation effects (Garello et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2012; Miron et al., 2011).”