Allgemein

Harnessing Orbital-to-Spin Conversion of Interfacial Orbital Currents for Efficient Spin-Orbit Torques

Shilei Ding, Andrew Ross, Dongwook Go, Lorenzo Baldrati, Zengyao Ren, Frank Freimuth, Sven Becker, Fabian Kammerbauer, Jinbo Yang, Gerhard Jakob, Yuriy Mokrousov, and Mathias Kläui

Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 177201 – Published 22 October 2020

Current-induced spin-orbit torques (SOTs) allow for the efficient electrical manipulation of magnetism in spintronic devices. Engineering the SOT efficiency is a key goal that is pursued by maximizing the active interfacial spin accumulation or modulating the nonequilibrium spin density that builds up through the spin Hall and inverse spin galvanic effects. Regardless of the origin, the fundamental requirement for the generation of the current-induced torques is a net spin accumulation. We report on the large enhancement of the SOT efficiency in thulium iron garnet (TmIG)/Pt by capping with a ${\mathrm{CuO}}_x$layer. Considering the weak spin-orbit coupling (SOC) of ${\mathrm{CuO}}_x$, these surprising findings likely result from an orbital current generated at the interface between ${\mathrm{CuO}}_x$ and Pt, which is injected into the Pt layer and converted into a spin current by strong SOC. The converted spin current decays across the Pt layer and exerts a “nonlocal” torque on TmIG. This additional torque leads to a maximum colossal enhancement of the SOT efficiency of a factor 16 for 1.5 nm of Pt at room temperature, thus opening a path to increase torques while at the same time offering insights into the underlying physics of orbital transport, which has so far been elusive.

https://comrad-etn.eu/

Theory of current-induced angular momentum transfer dynamics in spin-orbit coupled systems

Dongwook Go, Frank Freimuth, Jan-Philipp Hanke, Fei Xue, Olena Gomonay, Kyung-Jin Lee, Stefan Blügel, Paul M. Haney, Hyun-Woo Lee, and Yuriy Mokrousov

Phys. Rev. Research 2, 033401 – Published 14 September 2020

Motivated by the importance of understanding various competing mechanisms to the current-induced spin-orbit torque on magnetization in complex magnets, we develop a theory of current-induced spin-orbital coupled dynamics in magnetic heterostructures. The theory describes angular momentum transfer between different degrees of freedom in solids, e.g., the electron orbital and spin, the crystal lattice, and the magnetic order parameter. Based on the continuity equations for the spin and orbital angular momenta, we derive equations of motion that relate spin and orbital current fluxes and torques describing the transfer of angular momentum between different degrees of freedom, achieved in a steady state under an applied external electric field. We then propose a classification scheme for the mechanisms of the current-induced torque in magnetic bilayers. We evaluate the sources of torque using density functional theory, effectively capturing the impact of the electronic structure on these quantities. We apply our formalism to two different magnetic bilayers, Fe/W(110) and Ni/W(110), which are chosen such that the orbital and spin Hall effects in W have opposite sign and the resulting spin- and orbital-mediated torques can compete with each other. We find that while the spin torque arising from the spin Hall effect of W is the dominant mechanism of the current-induced torque in Fe/W(110), the dominant mechanism in Ni/W(110) is the orbital torque originating in the orbital Hall effect of the nonmagnetic substrate. Thus, the effective spin Hall angles for the total torque are negative and positive in the two systems. Our prediction can be experimentally identified in moderately clean samples, where intrinsic contributions dominate. This clearly demonstrates that our formalism is ideal for studying the angular momentum transfer dynamics in spin-orbit coupled systems as it goes beyond the “spin current picture” by naturally incorporating the spin and orbital degrees of freedom on an equal footing. Our calculations reveal that, in addition to the spin and orbital torque, other contributions such as the interfacial torque and self-induced anomalous torque within the ferromagnet are not negligible in both material systems.

Chiral Hall Effect in Noncollinear Magnets from a Cyclic Cohomology Approach

Fabian R. Lux, Frank Freimuth, Stefan Blügel, and Yuriy Mokrousov

Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 096602 – Published 4 March 2020

We demonstrate the emergence of an anomalous Hall effect in chiral magnetic textures which is neither proportional to the net magnetization nor to the well-known emergent magnetic field that is responsible for the topological Hall effect. Instead, it appears already at linear order in the gradients of the magnetization texture and exists for one-dimensional magnetic textures such as domain walls and spin spirals. It receives a natural interpretation in the language of Alain Connes’ noncommutative geometry. We show that this chiral Hall effect resembles the familiar topological Hall effect in essential properties while its phenomenology is distinctly different. Our findings make the reinterpretation of experimental data necessary, and offer an exciting twist in engineering the electrical transport through magnetic skyrmions.

Topological magneto-optical effects and their quantization in non-coplanar antiferromagnets

W. Feng, J.-P. Hanke, X. Zhou, G.-Y. Guo, S. Blügel, Y. Mokrousov, Y. Yao

Nature Communications 11, 118 (2020) 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13968-8

Reflecting the fundamental interactions of polarized light with magnetic matter, magneto-optical effects are well known since more than a century. The emergence of these phenomena is commonly attributed to the interplay between exchange splitting and spin-orbit coupling in the electronic structure of magnets. Using theoretical arguments, we demonstrate that topological magneto-optical effects can arise in noncoplanar antiferromagnets due to the finite scalar spin chirality, without any reference to exchange splitting or spin-orbit coupling. We propose spectral integrals of certain magneto-optical quantities that uncover the unique topological nature of the discovered effect. We also find that the Kerr and Faraday rotation angles can be quantized in insulating topological antiferromagnets in the low-frequency limit, owing to nontrivial global properties that manifest in quantum topological magneto-optical effects. Although the predicted topological and quantum topological magneto-optical effects are fundamentally distinct from conventional light-matter interactions, they can be measured by readily available experimental techniques.

 

Long-range chiral exchange interaction in synthetic antiferromagnets

D.-S. Han, K. Lee, J.-P. Hanke, Y. Mokrousov, K.-W. Kim, W. Yoo, Y. L. W. van Hees, T.-W. Kim, R. Lavrijsen, C.-Y. You, H. J. M. Swagten, M.-H. Jung and M. Kläui,

Nature Materials (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0370-z

The exchange interaction governs static and dynamic magnetism. This fundamental interaction comes in two flavours—symmetric and antisymmetric. The symmetric interaction leads to ferro- and antiferromagnetism, and the antisymmetric interaction has attracted significant interest owing to its major role in promoting topologically non-trivial spin textures that promise fast, energy-efficient devices. So far, the antisymmetric exchange interaction has been found to be rather short ranged and limited to a single magnetic layer. Here we report a long-range antisymmetric interlayer exchange interaction in perpendicularly magnetized synthetic antiferromagnets with parallel and antiparallel magnetization alignments. Asymmetric hysteresis loops under an in-plane field reveal a unidirectional and chiral nature of this interaction, which results in canted magnetic structures. We explain our results by considering spin–orbit coupling combined with reduced symmetry in multilayers. Our discovery of a long-range chiral interaction provides an additional handle to engineer magnetic structures and could enable three-dimensional topological structures.