Magnetic chirality controlled by the interlayer exchange interaction

Abstract

Chiral magnetism, wherein there is a preferred sense of rotation of the magnetization, has become a key aspect for future spintronic applications. It determines the chiral nature of magnetic textures, such as skyrmions, domain walls or spin spirals, and a specific magnetic chirality is often required for spintronic applications. Current research focuses on identifying and controlling the interactions that define the magnetic chirality. The influence of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (iDMI) and, recently, the dipolar interactions have previously been reported. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that an indirect interlayer exchange interaction can be used as an additional tool to effectively manipulate the magnetic chirality. We image the chirality of magnetic domain walls in a coupled bilayer system using scanning electron microscopy with polarization analysis (SEMPA). Upon increasing the interlayer exchange coupling, we induce a transition of the magnetic chirality from clockwise rotating Néel walls to degenerate Bloch-Néel domain walls and we confirm our findings with micromagnetic simulations. In multi-layered systems relevant for skyrmion research a uniform magnetic chirality across the magnetic layers is often desired. Additional simulations show that this can be achieved for reduced iDMI values when exploiting the interlayer exchange interaction. This work opens up new ways to control and tailor the magnetic chirality by the interlayer exchange interaction.

arXiv commentMs was off by a factor 2

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Chiral Spin Spirals at the Surface of the van der Waals Ferromagnet Fe${}_3$GeTe${}_2$
• Coexistence of distinct skyrmion phases observed in hybrid ferromagnetic/ferrimagnetic multilayers
• Enhanced thermally-activated skyrmion diffusion with tunable effective gyrotropic force
• Stabilizing chiral spin-structures via an alternating Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction
• Tuning the coexistence regime of incomplete and tubular skyrmions in ferro/ferri/ferromagnetic trilayers
• Stabilization and helicity control of hybrid magnetic skyrmion
• Asymmetric depinning of chiral domain walls in ferromagnetic trilayers
• Enhancing sensitivity in atomic force microscopy for planar tip-on-chip probes