A. W. J. Wells | Searcharxiv

arXiv2018

Role of phonon skew scattering in the spin Hall effect of platinum

We measure and analyze the effective spin Hall angle of platinum in the low residual resistivity regime by second harmonic measurements of the spin-orbit torques for a multilayer of Pt/Co/AlO$_x$. An angular dependent study of the torques allows us to extract the effective spin Hall angle responsible for the damping-like torque in the system. We observe a strikingly non-monotonic and reproducible temperature dependence of the torques. This behavior is compatible with recent theoretical predictions which include both intrinsic and extrinsic (impurities and phonons) contributions to the spin Hall effect at finite temperature.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2016

Effect of annealing on the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in Ta/CoFeB/MgO trilayers

The interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) has been shown to stabilize homochiral Néel-type domain walls in thin films with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and as a result permit them to be propagated by a spin Hall torque. In this study, we demonstrate that in Ta/Co$_{20}$Fe$_{60}$B$_{20}$/MgO the DMI may be influenced by annealing. We find that the DMI peaks at $D=0.057\pm0.003$ mJ/m$^{2}$ at an annealing temperature of 230 $^{\circ}$C. DMI fields were measured using a purely field-driven creep regime domain expansion technique. The DMI field and the anisotropy field follow a similar trend as a function of annealing temperature. We infer that the behavior of the DMI and the anisotropy are related to interfacial crystal ordering and B expulsion out of the CoFeB layer as the annealing temperature is increased.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗