Ferromagnetic exchange, spin–orbit coupling and spiral magnetism at the LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interface
By S. Banerjee, O. Erten, M. Randeria. Nature Physics, 2013
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The interface between two non-magnetic band insulators, LaAlO3 and SrTiO3, can exhibit conductivity, superconductivity and magnetism. These interfacial phenomena can be reconciled by a theory that predicts a spiral magnetic ground state. The electronic properties of the polar interface between insulating oxides is a subject of great interest1,2,3. An exciting development is the observation of robust magnetism4,5,6,7,8 at the interface of two non-magnetic materials, LaAlO3 (LAO) and SrTiO3 (STO). Here we present a microscopic theory for the formation and interaction of local moments that depends on essential features of the LAO/STO interface. We show that correlation-induced moments arise owing to interfacial splitting of orbital degeneracy. We find that conduction electrons with a gate-tunable Rashba spin–orbit coupling mediate ferromagnetic exchange with a twist. We predict that the zero-field ground state is a long-wavelength spiral. Its evolution in an external field accounts semi-quantitatively for torque magnetometry data5 and describes qualitative aspects of the scanning superconducting quantum interference device measurements6. We make several testable predictions for future experiments.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c170ec3a9a52c03ed5372655032f4e9dc5290e17
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In Condensed Matter Physics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Magnetic Oxide Heterostructures (2014, background): “Stabilizing spin spiral states via the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction may be possible (150).”