Strain-induced Shape Anisotropy in Antiferromagnetic Structures

Abstract

We demonstrate how shape-induced strain can be used to control antiferromagnetic order in NiO/Pt thin films. For rectangular elements patterned along the easy and hard magnetocrystalline anisotropy axes of our film, we observe different domain structures and we identify magnetoelastic interactions that are distinct for different domain configurations. We reproduce the experimental observations by modeling the magnetoelastic interactions, considering spontaneous strain induced by the domain configuration, as well as elastic strain due to the substrate and the shape of the patterns. This allows us to demonstrate and explain how the variation of the aspect ratio of rectangular elements can be used to control the antiferromagnetic ground state domain configuration. Shape-dependent strain does not only need to be considered in the design of antiferromagnetic devices, but can potentially be used to tailor their properties, providing an additional handle to control antiferromagnets.

References in corpus (4)

• Negative spin Hall magnetoresistance of Pt on the bulk easy-plane antiferromagnet NiO
• Direct imaging of current-induced antiferromagnetic switching revealing a pure thermomagnetoelastic switching mechanism
• Identification of Néel vector orientation in antiferromagnetic domains switched by currents in NiO/Pt thin films
• Effective strain manipulation of the antiferromagnetic state of polycrystalline NiO

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• Identifiying the domain wall spin structure in current-induced switching of antiferromagnetic NiO/Pt
• Antiferromagnetic nanoscale bit arrays of magnetoelectric Cr${}_2$O${}_3$ thin films
• A proposal for leaky integrate-and-fire neurons by domain walls in antiferromagnetic insulators
• Strain-driven domain wall network with chiral junctions in an antiferromagnet