Fast current-driven domain walls and small skyrmions in a compensated ferrimagnet
Author(s)
Caretta, Lucas; Mann, Maxwell; Büttner, Felix; Ueda, Kohei; Pfau, Bastian; Günther, Christian M; Hessing, Piet; Churikova, Alexandra; Klose, Christopher; Schneider, Michael; Engel, Dieter; Marcus, Colin; Bono, David; Bagschik, Kai; Eisebitt, Stefan; Beach, Geoffrey SD; ... Show more Show less
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© 2018, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Spintronics is a research field that aims to understand and control spins on the nanoscale and should enable next-generation data storage and manipulation. One technological and scientific key challenge is to stabilize small spin textures and to move them efficiently with high velocities. For a long time, research focused on ferromagnetic materials, but ferromagnets show fundamental limits for speed and size. Here, we circumvent these limits using compensated ferrimagnets. Using ferrimagnetic Pt/Gd44Co56/TaOx films with a sizeable Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction, we realize a current-driven domain wall motion with a speed of 1.3 km s–1 near the angular momentum compensation temperature (TA) and room-temperature-stable skyrmions with minimum diameters close to 10 nm near the magnetic compensation temperature (TM). Both the size and dynamics of the ferrimagnet are in excellent agreement with a simplified effective ferromagnet theory. Our work shows that high-speed, high-density spintronics devices based on current-driven spin textures can be realized using materials in which TA and TM are close together.
Date issued
2018Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and EngineeringJournal
Nature Nanotechnology
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC