NCEM, Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Department of Physics, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02447, Korea.
Nat Commun. 2017 May 19;8:15302. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15302.
Chiral spin textures in ultrathin films, such as skyrmions or chiral domain walls, are believed to offer large performance advantages in the development of novel spintronics technologies. While in-plane magnetized films have been studied extensively as media for current- and field-driven domain wall dynamics with applications in memory or logic devices, the stabilization of chiral spin textures in in-plane magnetized films has remained rare. Here we report a phase of spin structures in an in-plane magnetized ultrathin film system where out-of-plane spin orientations within domain walls are stable. Moreover, while domain walls in in-plane films are generally expected to be non-chiral, we show that right-handed spin rotations are strongly favoured in this system, due to the presence of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. These results constitute a platform to explore unconventional spin dynamics and topological phenomena that may enable high-performance in-plane spin-orbitronics devices.
在超薄薄膜中，手征自旋纹理（如 skyrmions 或手征畴壁）被认为在开发新型自旋电子技术方面具有很大的性能优势。虽然平面磁化薄膜已被广泛研究作为电流和磁场驱动畴壁动力学的介质，可应用于存储或逻辑器件，但平面磁化薄膜中手征自旋纹理的稳定仍然很少见。在这里，我们报告了一种在平面磁化超薄薄膜系统中的自旋结构相，其中畴壁内的面外自旋取向是稳定的。此外，虽然平面薄膜中的畴壁通常预计是非手征的，但我们表明，由于界面 Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya 相互作用的存在，右手自旋旋转在该系统中受到强烈偏好。这些结果为探索可能实现高性能平面自旋轨道电子器件的非常规自旋动力学和拓扑现象提供了一个平台。
