Enhanced Spin-Orbit Torques in Pt/Co/Ta Heterostructures

By M. Mann, S. Woo, Lucas Caretta, A. Tan, G. Beach. 2014

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spin-orbit torques (SOTs) are studied in perpendicularly magnetized ultrathin Co films sandwiched between two heavy metals, Pt and Ta. A significant enhancement of the Slonczewski-like torque is achieved by placing dissimilar metals with opposite spin Hall angles on opposite sides of the ferromagnet. SOTs were characterized through harmonic measurements and the contribution by the Ta overlayer was isolated by systematically varying its thickness. An effective spin Hall angle of up to 34% is observed, along with a sizable field-like torque that increases with increasing Ta layer thickness. Current-induced switching measurements reveal a corresponding increase in switching efficiency, suggesting that by engineering both interfaces in trilayer structures, the SOTs can be significantly improved.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c319b3f8ffa7c73fce8fb07b9a4ba135805ba9da

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, background): “Enhanced efficiencies can be obtained in multilayers where the FM is sandwiched between two NM with opposite spin Hall angle (Woo et al., 2014; Yu et al., 2016b).”
Skyrmions in magnetic multilayers (2017, background): “The resultant additive SOTs acts constructively on the magnetization dynamics and thus results in an efficient electrical manipulation and translation motion of magnetic skyrmions [151, 205, 206].”