Antiferromagnetic textures and dynamics on the surface of a heavy metal

Abstract

We investigate the formation and dynamics of spin textures in antiferromagnetic insulators adjacent to a heavy-metal substrate with strong spin-orbit interactions. Exchange coupling to conduction electrons engenders an effective anisotropy, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, and a magnetoelectric effect for the Néel order, which can conspire to produce nontrivial antiferromagnetic textures. Current-driven spin transfer enabled by the heavy metal, furthermore, triggers ultrafast (THz) oscillations of the Néel order for dc currents exceeding a critical threshold, opening up the possibility of Terahertz spin-torque self-oscillators. For a commonly invoked antidamping-torque geometry, however, the instability current scales with the energy gap of the antiferromagnetic insulator and, therefore, may be challenging to reach experimentally. We propose an alternative generic geometry for inducing ultrafast autonomous antiferromagnetic dynamics.

5+2 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Quantitative Study on Current-Induced Effect in an Antiferromagnet Insulator/Pt Bilayer Film
• Efficient Spin-Orbit Torques in an Antiferromagnetic Insulator with Tilted Easy Plane
• Spin-Torque-driven Terahertz Auto Oscillations in Non-Collinear Coplanar Antiferromagnets
• Current-driven nucleation and propagation of antiferromagnetic skyrmionium
• Fast Vortex Oscillations in a Ferrimagnetic Disk near the Angular Momentum Compensation Point
• Tunable skyrmion-skyrmion binding on the surface of a topological insulator
• Stabilization of the skyrmion crystal phase in thin-film antiferromagnets
• Magnetoelectric antiferromagnets as platforms for the manipulation of solitons
• Chiral-induced switching of antiferromagnet spins in a confined nanowire
• Voltage-Controlled High-Bandwidth Terahertz Oscillators Based On Antiferromagnets
• Propagation of Spin Waves Through an Interface Between Ferromagnetic and Antiferromagnetic Materials
• Collective spin dynamics under dissipative spin Hall torque
• First-principles calculations of spin-orbit torques in Mn${}_2$Au/heavy-metal bilayers
• Part of a collection of reviews on antiferromagnetic spintronics. Antiferromagnetic dynamics, spin-texures, and nanostructures
• 3D Analytical Model of Skyrmions and Skyrmion-like Structures in a Two-sublattice Antiferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction