An international team of researchers from IMDEA Nanociencia and Complutense and Autónoma universities in Madrid, the Institut Néel in Grenoble and the ALBA Synchrotron in Barcelona has elucidated a new property of Graphene/Ferromagnetic interfaces: the existence of a sizable magnetic unidirectional interaction, technically a Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction of Rashba origin, which is responsible for establishing a chiral character to magnetic domain wall structures.
A major challenge for future spintronics is to develop suitable spin transport channels with long spin lifetime and propagation length. Graphene can meet these requirements, even at room temperature. On the other side, taking advantage of the fast motion of chiral textures, that is, Néel-type domain walls and magnetic skyrmions, can satisfy the demands for high-density data storage, low power consumption, and high processing speed. The integration of graphene as an efficient spin transport channel in the chiral domain walls technology depends on the ability to fabricate graphene-based perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) systems with tailored interfacial SOC.
Studies on graphene-based magnetic systems are not abundant and, typically, make use of metallic single crystals as substrates which jeopardize the exploration of their transport properties (since the current is drained by the substrate). To solve this challenge, the IMDEA Nanociencia leading team succeeded to fabricate high-quality epitaxial asymmetric gr/Co/Pt(111) structures grown on (111)-oriented oxide substrates. The quality of the interfaces was checked by low-energy electron diffraction and also by advanced high-resolution transmission microscopy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) microscopy centre and resonant X-ray specular reflectivity at BOREAS beamline at ALBA (see fig.1). The magnetic anisotropy and properties were investigated by magneto-optical Kerr magnetometry in IMDEA and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and complemented with element resolved XMCD magnetometry also at BOREAS beamline. Finally, the chirality of the magnetic domain walls was analysed using a customized magneto-optical Kerr effect microscope and pulse field electronics in collaboration with the team at Institut Néel in Grenoble.
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