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arXiv · 1704.09023

Significant Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction at Graphene-Ferromagnet Interfaces due to Rashba-effect

Hongxin Yang·Gong Chen·Alexandre A. C. Cotta·Alpha T. N'Diaye·Sergey A. Nikolaev·Edmar A. Soares·Waldemar A. A. Macedo·Andreas K. Schmid·Albert Fert·Mairbek Chshiev
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Abstract

The possibility of utilizing the rich spin-dependent properties of graphene has attracted great attention in pursuit of spintronics advances. The promise of high-speed and low-energy consumption devices motivates a search for layered structures that stabilize chiral spin textures such as topologically protected skyrmions. Here we demonstrate that chiral spin textures are induced at graphene/ferromagnetic metal interfaces. This is unexpected because graphene is a weak spin-orbit coupling material and is generally not expected to induce sufficient Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction to affect magnetic chirality. We demonstrate that graphene induces a new type of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction due to a Rashba effect. First-principles calculations and experiments using spin-polarized electron microscopy show that this graphene-induced Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can have similar magnitude as at interfaces with heavy metals. This work paves a new path towards two-dimensional material based spin orbitronics.

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BibTeXRIS

Hongxin Yang, Gong Chen, Alexandre A. C. Cotta, Alpha T. N'Diaye, Sergey A. Nikolaev, Edmar A. Soares, Waldemar A. A. Macedo, Andreas K. Schmid, Albert Fert, Mairbek Chshiev. 2017-04-28. Significant Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction at Graphene-Ferromagnet Interfaces due to Rashba-effect. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0079-4

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