The last decade has seen significant improvements in our understanding of skyrmions current induced dynamics, along with their room temperature stabilization, however, the impact of local material inhomogeneities still remains an issue that impedes reaching the regime of steady state motion of these spin textures. Here, we study the spin-torque driven motion of skyrmions in synthetic ferrimagnetic multilayers with the aim of achieving high mobility and reduced skyrmion Hall effect. We consider Pt|Co|Tb multilayers of various thicknesses with antiferromagnetic coupling between the Co and Tb magnetization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe hallmark of spintronics has been the ability of spin-orbit interactions to convert a charge current into a spin current and vice versa, mainly in the bulk of heavy metal thin films. Here, we demonstrate how a light metal interface profoundly affects both the nature of spin-orbit torques and its efficiency in terms of damping-like () and field-like () effective fields in ultrathin Co films. We measure unexpectedly / ratios much larger than 1 by inserting a nanometer-thin Al metallic layer in Pt|Co|Al|Pt as compared to a similar stacking, including Cu as a reference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn multilayers of magnetic thin films with perpendicular anisotropy, domain walls can take on hybrid configurations in the vertical direction which minimize the domain wall energy, with Néel walls in the top or bottom layers and Bloch walls in some central layers. These types of textures are theoretically predicted, but their observation has remained challenging until recently, with only a few techniques capable of realizing a three dimensional characterization of their magnetization distribution. Here we perform a field dependent X-ray resonant magnetic scattering measurements on magnetic multilayers exploiting circular dichroism contrast to investigate such structures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNon-collinear spin textures in ferromagnetic ultrathin films are attracting a renewed interest fueled by possible fine engineering of several magnetic interactions, notably the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. This allows for the stabilization of complex chiral spin textures such as chiral magnetic domain walls (DWs), spin spirals, and magnetic skyrmions among others. We report here on the behavior of chiral DWs at ultrashort timescale after optical pumping in perpendicularly magnetized asymmetric multilayers.
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