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Magneto-Optical Analysis of Magnetic Anisotropy in Ultrathin Tm$_{3}$Fe$_{5}$O$_{12}$/Pt Bilayers
Authors:
T. Nathan Nunley,
Daniel Russell,
Liang-Juan Chang,
David Lujan,
Jeongheon Choe,
Side Guo,
Shang-Fan Lee,
Fengyuan Yang,
Xiaoqin Li
Abstract:
Magnetic bilayers consisting of an epitaxially grown ferrimagnetic insulator and a heavy metal layer are attractive for spintronic application because of the opportunity for electric control and read-out of spin textures via spin orbit torque. Here, we investigate ultrathin thulium iron garnet (TmIG)/Pt bilayers when the TmIG layer thickness is 3 nm and below using a sensitive Sagnac magneto-optic…
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Magnetic bilayers consisting of an epitaxially grown ferrimagnetic insulator and a heavy metal layer are attractive for spintronic application because of the opportunity for electric control and read-out of spin textures via spin orbit torque. Here, we investigate ultrathin thulium iron garnet (TmIG)/Pt bilayers when the TmIG layer thickness is 3 nm and below using a sensitive Sagnac magneto-optical Kerr effect technique. We compare the hysteresis loops from out-of-plane and in-plane applied magnetic fields. The preferred magnetization orientation evolves with the TmIG thickness and the presence of the Pt overlayer. We quantify the evolution of the magnetic anisotropy in these ultrathin films and find a significant change even when the TmIG thickness is varied by less than 1 nm. In these ultrathin films, the presence of a Pt overlayer changes the effective anisotropy field by more than a factor of 2, suggesting that the interfacial anisotropy at the Pt/TmIG interface plays a critical role in this regime.
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Submitted 23 April, 2025;
originally announced April 2025.
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Long-lived Zone-boundary Magnons in an Antiferromagnet
Authors:
Jeongheon Choe,
David Lujan,
Gaihua Ye,
Cynthia Nnokwe,
Bowen Ma,
Jiaming He,
Frank Y. Gao,
T. Nathan Nunley,
Aritz Leonardo,
Mikel Arruabarrena,
Andres Ayuela,
Jianshi Zhou,
Martin Rodriguez-Vega,
Gregory A. Fiete,
Rui He,
Xiaoqin Li
Abstract:
Antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulators exhibit many desirable features for spintronic applications such as fast dynamics in the THz range and robustness to fluctuating external fields. However, large damping typically associated with THz magnons presents a serious challenge for THz magnonic applications. Here, we report long-lived short-wavelength zone boundary magnons in the honeycomb AFM insulator C…
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Antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulators exhibit many desirable features for spintronic applications such as fast dynamics in the THz range and robustness to fluctuating external fields. However, large damping typically associated with THz magnons presents a serious challenge for THz magnonic applications. Here, we report long-lived short-wavelength zone boundary magnons in the honeycomb AFM insulator CoTiO3, recently found to host topological magnons. We find that its zone-boundary THz magnons exhibit longer lifetimes than its zone-center magnons. This unusual momentum-dependent long magnon lifetime originates from several factors including the antiferromagnetic order, exchange anisotropy, a finite magnon gap, and magnon band dispersion. Our work suggests that magnon-magnon interaction may not be detrimental to magnon lifetimes and should be included in future searches for topological magnons.
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Submitted 20 April, 2025;
originally announced April 2025.
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Physical Vapor Transport Growth of Antiferromagnetic CrCl$_3$ Flakes Down to Monolayer Thickness
Authors:
Jia Wang,
Zahra Ahmadi,
David Lujan,
Jeongheon Choe,
Takashi Taniguchi,
Kenji Watanabe,
Xiaoqin Li,
Jeffrey E. Shield,
Xia Hong
Abstract:
The van der Waals magnets CrX$_3$ (X = I, Br, and Cl) exhibit highly tunable magnetic properties and are promising candidates for developing novel two-dimensional (2D) magnetic devices such as magnetic tunnel junctions and spin tunneling transistors. Previous studies of CrCl$_3$ have mainly focused on mechanically exfoliated samples. Controlled synthesis of high quality atomically thin flakes is c…
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The van der Waals magnets CrX$_3$ (X = I, Br, and Cl) exhibit highly tunable magnetic properties and are promising candidates for developing novel two-dimensional (2D) magnetic devices such as magnetic tunnel junctions and spin tunneling transistors. Previous studies of CrCl$_3$ have mainly focused on mechanically exfoliated samples. Controlled synthesis of high quality atomically thin flakes is critical for their technological implementation but has not been achieved to date. Here, we report the growth of large CrCl$_3$ flakes with well-defined facets down to monolayer thickness (~0.6 nm) via the physical vapor transport technique. Both isolated flakes with well-defined facets and long stripe samples with the trilayer portion exceeding 60 $μ$m have been obtained. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy studies show that the CrCl$_3$ flakes are single crystalline in the monoclinic structure, consistent with the Raman results. The room temperature stability of the CrCl$_3$ flakes decreases with decreasing thickness. The tunneling magnetoresistance of graphite/CrCl$_3$/graphite tunnel junctions confirms that few-layer CrCl$_3$ possesses in-plane magnetic anisotropy and Néel temperature of 17 K. Our study paves the path for developing CrCl$_3$-based scalable 2D spintronic applications.
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Submitted 4 December, 2022; v1 submitted 12 August, 2022;
originally announced August 2022.
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Strong bulk Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in composition-uniform centrosymmetric magnetic single layers
Authors:
Lijun Zhu,
David Lujan,
Xiaoqin Li
Abstract:
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) is the key ingredient of chiral spintronic phenomena and the emerging technologies based on such phenomena. A nonzero DMI usually occurs at magnetic interfaces or within non-centrosymmetric single crystals. Here, we report the observation of a strong unexpected DMI within a centrosymmetric polycrystalline ferromagnet that has neither a crystal inversion symm…
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Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) is the key ingredient of chiral spintronic phenomena and the emerging technologies based on such phenomena. A nonzero DMI usually occurs at magnetic interfaces or within non-centrosymmetric single crystals. Here, we report the observation of a strong unexpected DMI within a centrosymmetric polycrystalline ferromagnet that has neither a crystal inversion symmetry breaking nor a composition gradient. This DMI is a bulk effect, increases with the thickness of the magnetic layer, and is insensitive to the symmetry of the interfaces or the neighboring materials. We observe a total DMI strength that is a factor of >2 greater than the highest interfacial DMI in the literature. This DMI most likely arises from the strong spin-orbit coupling, strong orbital hybridization, and a "hidden" long-range asymmetry in the material. Our discovery of the strong unconventional bulk DMI in centrosymmetric, composition-uniform magnetic single layers provide fundamental building blocks for the emerging field of spintronics and will stimulate the exploitation of unconventional spin-orbit phenomena in a wide range of materials.
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Submitted 4 July, 2022;
originally announced July 2022.
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Chiral symmetry breaking for deterministic switching of perpendicular magnetization by spin-orbit torque
Authors:
Hao Wu,
John Nance,
Seyed Armin Razavi,
David Lujan,
Bingqian Dai,
Yuxiang Liu,
Haoran He,
Baoshan Cui,
Di Wu,
Kin Wong,
Kemal Sobotkiewich,
Xiaoqin Li,
Gregory P. Carman,
Kang L. Wang
Abstract:
Symmetry breaking is a characteristic to determine which branch of a bifurcation system follows upon crossing a critical point. Specifically, in spin-orbit torque (SOT) devices, a fundamental question arises: how to break the symmetry of the perpendicular magnetic moment by the in-plane spin polarization? Here, we show that the chiral symmetry breaking by the DMI can induce the deterministic SOT s…
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Symmetry breaking is a characteristic to determine which branch of a bifurcation system follows upon crossing a critical point. Specifically, in spin-orbit torque (SOT) devices, a fundamental question arises: how to break the symmetry of the perpendicular magnetic moment by the in-plane spin polarization? Here, we show that the chiral symmetry breaking by the DMI can induce the deterministic SOT switching of the perpendicular magnetization. By introducing a gradient of saturation magnetization or magnetic anisotropy, non-collinear spin textures are formed by the gradient of effective SOT strength, and thus the chiral symmetry of the SOT-induced spin textures is broken by the DMI, resulting in the deterministic magnetization switching. We introduce a strategy to induce an out-of-plane (z) gradient of magnetic properties, as a practical solution for the wafer-scale manufacture of SOT devices.
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Submitted 28 April, 2020;
originally announced April 2020.
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Vacuum energy density and pressure near a soft wall
Authors:
S. W. Murray,
C. M. Whisler,
S. A. Fulling,
Jef Wagner,
H. B. Carter,
David Lujan,
F. D. Mera,
T. E. Settlemyre
Abstract:
Perfectly conducting boundaries, and their Dirichlet counterparts for quantum scalar fields, predict nonintegrable energy densities. A more realistic model with a finite ultraviolet cutoff yields two inconsistent values for the force on a curved or edged boundary (the "pressure anomaly"). A still more realistic, but still easily calculable, model replaces the hard wall by a power-law potential; be…
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Perfectly conducting boundaries, and their Dirichlet counterparts for quantum scalar fields, predict nonintegrable energy densities. A more realistic model with a finite ultraviolet cutoff yields two inconsistent values for the force on a curved or edged boundary (the "pressure anomaly"). A still more realistic, but still easily calculable, model replaces the hard wall by a power-law potential; because it involves no a posteriori modification of the formulas calculated from the theory, this model should be anomaly-free. Here we first set up the formalism and notation for the quantization of a scalar field in the background of a planar soft wall, and we approximate the reduced Green function in perturbative and WKB limits (the latter being appropriate when either the mode frequency or the depth into the wall is sufficiently large). Then we display numerical calculations of energy density and pressure for the region outside the wall, which show that the pressure anomaly does not occur there. Calculations inside the wall are postponed to later papers, which must tackle regularization and renormalization of divergences induced by the potential in the bulk region.
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Submitted 17 March, 2016; v1 submitted 30 December, 2015;
originally announced December 2015.