Abstract
Contacting ferromagnetic films with normal metals changes how magnetic textures respond to electric currents, enabling surprisingly fast domain wall motions and spin texture-dependent propagation direction. These effects are attributed to domain wall chirality induced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction at interfaces, which suggests rich possibilities to influence domain wall dynamics if the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can be adjusted. Chiral magnetism was seen in several film structures on appropriately chosen substrates where interfacial spin-orbit-coupling effects are strong. Here we use real-space imaging to visualize chiral domain walls in cobalt/nickel multilayers in contact with platinum and iridium. We show that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can be adjusted to stabilize either left-handed or right-handed Néel walls, or non-chiral Bloch walls by adjusting an interfacial spacer layer between the multilayers and the substrate. Our findings introduce domain wall chirality as a new degree of freedom, which may open up new opportunities for spintronics device designs.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2671 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge Professor Z.Q. Qiu for helpful discussions and Dr. Colin Ophus for his contributions to the graphics. Experiments were performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Scientific User Facilities Division, of the US Department of Energy under Contract number DE-AC02—05CH11231. This work was also supported by MOST (numbers 2011CB921801 and 2009CB929203), by NSFC of China (numbers 10925416 and 11274074), by WHMFC (number WHMFCKF2011008) and by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (2012R1A1A2007524).