The interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in heavy-metal/ferromagnet heterostructures enables to stabilize and manipulate novel topological spin textures, such as skyrmions, which arise as potential logic and memory devices for future information technology. Along these lines, we study in this work the topological spin textures in the films of magnetic insulators by detecting the spin-Hall topological Hall effect (SH-THE). The SH-THE presents obvious dependence of epitaxial strain in Pt/Tm3Fe5O12 (TmIG) bilayers deposited on a series of (111)-oriented garnet substrates, indicating that the topological spin textures can be tuned by epitaxial strain in this system. It is interesting to note that the room-temperature and low-field peak of SH-THE is also recorded within the Pt/TmIG bilayer configuration. We have also examined the interfacial DMI in the Pt/TmIG bilayers by an extended droplet model. The results indicate that the epitaxial strain can effectively change the interfacial DMI in this system, suggesting that the strain-induced modification of the interfacial DMI is the driving force for the SH-THE and topological spin textures in the Pt/TmIG bilayers. Our outcomes open new exciting avenues and opportunities in engineering chiral magnetism and examining the future skyrmion technology in magnetic insulators through the application of epitaxial strain.
Keywords: insulating magnetic oxides; interfacial DMI; strain engineering; topological Hall effect; topological magnetic texture.