Homochiral antiferromagnetic merons, antimerons and bimerons realized in synthetic antiferromagnets

Abstract

The ever-growing demand for device miniaturization and energy efficiency in data storage and computing technology has prompted a shift towards antiferromagnetic (AFM) topological spin textures as information carriers, owing to their negligible stray fields, leading to possible high device density and potentially ultrafast dynamics. We realize, in this work, such chiral in-plane (IP) topological antiferromagnetic spin textures, namely merons, antimerons, and bimerons in synthetic antiferromagnets by concurrently engineering the effective perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, the interlayer exchange coupling, and the magnetic compensation ratio. We demonstrate by three-dimensional vector imaging of the Néel order parameter, the topology of those spin textures and reveal globally a well-defined chirality, which is a crucial requirement for controlled current-induced dynamics. Our analysis reveals that the interplay between interlayer exchange and interlayer magnetic dipolar interactions plays a key role in significantly reducing the critical strength of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction required to stabilize topological spin textures, such as AFM merons, making synthetic antiferromagnets a promising platform for next-generation spintronics applications.

18pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Enhanced thermally-activated skyrmion diffusion with tunable effective gyrotropic force
• Bimerons create bimerons: proliferation and aggregation induced by currents and magnetic fields
• Topological orbital Hall effect caused by skyrmions and antiferromagnetic skyrmions
• Topological meron-antimeron domain walls and skyrmions in a low-symmetry system
• Zero Field Antiferromagnetically Coupled Skyrmions and their Field-Driven Uncoupling in Composite Chiral Multilayers
• Laser-induced helicity and texture-dependent switching of nanoscale stochastic domains in a ferromagnetic film
• Hyperbolic Bloch points in ferrimagnetic exchange spring
• Observation of a non-reciprocal skyrmion Hall effect of hybrid chiral skyrmion tubes in synthetic antiferromagnetic multilayers
• Antiferromagnetic Skyrmion Scattering Revealed by Direct Time-Resolved Imaging of Collective Dynamics