Tailoring of the Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction in Perpendicularly Magnetized Epitaxial Multilayers by Crystal Engineering

Jie Qi; Yunchi Zhao; He Huang; Yi Zhang; Haochang Lyu; Guang Yang; Jingyan Zhang; Bokai Shao; Kui Jin; Ying Zhang; Hongxiang Wei; Baogen Shen; Shouguo Wang

doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c03543

Tailoring of the Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction in Perpendicularly Magnetized Epitaxial Multilayers by Crystal Engineering

J Phys Chem Lett. 2023 Jan 26;14(3):637-644. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c03543. Epub 2023 Jan 12.

Authors

Jie Qi¹, Yunchi Zhao², He Huang¹, Yi Zhang¹, Haochang Lyu^{1

2}, Guang Yang³, Jingyan Zhang¹, Bokai Shao¹, Kui Jin^{2

4}, Ying Zhang^{2

4}, Hongxiang Wei², Baogen Shen², Shouguo Wang^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Materials Genome Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing100083, China.
² Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing100190, China.
³ School of Integrated Circuit Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing100191, China.
⁴ Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan, Guangdong523808, China.
⁵ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Anhui University, Hefei230601, China.

PMID: 36634038
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c03543

Abstract

The interplay between the interfacial crystalline structure and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) was investigated by Fe insertion in epitaxial Pt/Co/Ir perpendicular magnetized multilayers. The experimental results with the support of first-principles calculation indicate that the Fe/Ir interface exhibits a positive interfacial DMI (iDMI) originating from the fcc crystalline structure inserted by 2 monolayers (ML) Fe, while a negative one from the structure with a layer shifting of 1-ML Fe insertion. The total iDMI of the multilayers increases (decreases) due to the additive enhancement (competitive counteraction) between the iDMI of Fe/Ir and Pt/Co interfaces. Comparing the iDMI of single-crystalline and textured multilayers, the iDMI of multilayers is found to be particularly sensitive to the crystallinity nearby the heterointerfaces. This work is of vital importance to reveal a deeper insight into the physical mechanism of the iDMI and provides a viable strategy for tailoring the iDMI of the multilayers by crystal engineering.