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arXiv · 2203.00884

Strong and tunable magnetoelectric coupling in 2D trilayer heterostructures

Xin Jin·Andrew O'Hara·Yu-Yang Zhang·Shixuan Du·Sokrates T. Pantelides
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Abstract

The quest for electric-field control of nanoscale magnetic states such as skyrmions, which would impact the field of spintronics, has led to a challenging search for multiferroic materials or structures with strong magnetoelectric coupling and efficient electric-field control. Here we report a theoretical prediction that such phenomena can be realized in two-dimensional (2D) bilayer FE/PMM and trilayer FE/PMM/FE heterostructures (two-terminal and three-terminal devices), where FE is a 2D ferroelectric and PMM is a polar magnetic metal with strong spin-orbit coupling. Such a PMM has strong Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI) that can generate skyrmions, while the FE can generate strong magnetoelectric coupling through polarization-polarization interactions. In trilayer heterostructures, contact to the metallic PMM layer enables multiple polarization configurations for electric-field control of skyrmions. We report density-functional-theory calculations for particular material choices that demonstrate the effectiveness of these arrangements, with the key driver being the polarization-polarization interactions between the PMM and FE layers. The present findings provide a method to achieve strong magnetoelectric coupling in the 2D limit and a new perspective for the design of related spintronics.

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Xin Jin, Andrew O'Hara, Yu-Yang Zhang, Shixuan Du, Sokrates T. Pantelides. 2022-10-18. Strong and tunable magnetoelectric coupling in 2D trilayer heterostructures. https://doi.org/10.1088/2053-1583%2Fac9b6e

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