Thermal nucleation and high-resolution imaging of submicrometer magnetic bubbles in thin thulium iron garnet films with perpendicular anisotropy
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PhysRevMaterials.4.011401.pdf
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Author(s)
Büttner, Felix
Mawass, Mohamad A.
Bauer, Jackson
Rosenberg, Ethan Raphael
Caretta, Lucas Marcelo
Avci, Can Onur
Gräfe, Joachim
Finizio, Simone
Vaz, C. A. F.
Novakovic, Nina
Date Issued
January 2020
Journal
Physical Review Materials
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Büttner, Felix, et al. "Thermal nucleation and high-resolution imaging of submicrometer magnetic bubbles in thin thulium iron garnet films with perpendicular anisotropy." Physical Review Materials, 4, 1 (January 2020): 011401(R). © 2020 American Physical Society
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Final published version
Abstract
Ferrimagnetic iron garnets are promising materials for spintronics applications, characterized by ultralow damping and zero current shunting. It has recently been found that few nm-thick garnet films interfaced with a heavy metal can also exhibit sizable interfacial spin-orbit interactions, leading to the emergence, and efficient electrical control, of one-dimensional chiral domain walls. Two-dimensional bubbles, by contrast, have so far only been confirmed in micrometer-thick films. Here, we show by high resolution scanning transmission x-ray microscopy and photoemission electron microscopy that submicrometer bubbles can be nucleated and stabilized in ∼25-nm-thick thulium iron garnet films via short heat pulses generated by electric current in an adjacent Pt strip, or by ultrafast laser illumination. We also find that quasistatic processes do not lead to the formation of a bubble state, suggesting that the thermodynamic path to reaching that state requires transient dynamics. X-ray imaging reveals that the bubbles have Bloch-type walls with random chirality and topology, indicating negligible chiral interactions at the garnet film thickness studied here. The robustness of thermal nucleation and the feasibility demonstrated here to image garnet-based devices by x-rays both in transmission geometry and with sensitivity to the domain wall chirality are critical steps to enabling the study of small spin textures and dynamics in perpendicularly magnetized thin-film garnets.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.4.011401
