TY - JOUR
T1 - Chiral spin spiral in synthetic antiferromagnets probed by circular dichroism in x-ray resonant magnetic scattering
AU - Léveillé, Cyril
AU - Flewett, Samuel
AU - Burgos-Parra, Erick
AU - Sassi, Yanis
AU - Legrand, William
AU - Ajejas, Fernando
AU - Cros, Vincent
AU - Reyren, Nicolas
AU - Jaouen, Nicolas
N1 - Funding Information:
Financial support from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France (ANR) with TOPSKY (ANR-17-CE24-0025), FLAG-ERA SographMEM (ANR-15-GRFL-0005, PCI2019-111908-2), and as part of the Investissements d'Avenir program SPiCY (ANR-10-LABX-0035), from Mineco grant AEI/FEDER, UE (FIS2016-7859-C3-2-R), and from the Horizon2020 Framework Program of the European Commission under FET-Proactive Grant SKYTOP (824123), is acknowledged.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Physical Society.
PY - 2021/8/1
Y1 - 2021/8/1
N2 - Noncollinear chiral spin textures in ferromagnetic multilayers are at the forefront of recent research in nanomagnetism with the promise of fast and energy-efficient devices. The recently demonstrated possibilities to stabilize such chiral structures in synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs) has raised interest as they are immune to dipolar field, hence favoring the stabilization of ultrasmall textures. They also improve mobility and avoid the transverse deflections of moving skyrmions limiting the efficiency in some foreseen applications. However, such systems with zero net magnetization are difficult to characterize by most of the standard techniques. Here, we report that the relevant parameters of a magnetic SAF texture, those being its period, its type (Néel or Bloch), and its chirality (clockwise or counterclockwise), can be directly determined using the circular dichroism in x-ray resonant scattering at half-integer multilayer Bragg peaks in reciprocal space. The analysis of the dependence in temperature down to 40 K allows us moreover to address the question of the temperature stability of a spin spiral in a SAF sample and of the temperature scaling of the symmetric and antisymmetric exchange interactions.
AB - Noncollinear chiral spin textures in ferromagnetic multilayers are at the forefront of recent research in nanomagnetism with the promise of fast and energy-efficient devices. The recently demonstrated possibilities to stabilize such chiral structures in synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs) has raised interest as they are immune to dipolar field, hence favoring the stabilization of ultrasmall textures. They also improve mobility and avoid the transverse deflections of moving skyrmions limiting the efficiency in some foreseen applications. However, such systems with zero net magnetization are difficult to characterize by most of the standard techniques. Here, we report that the relevant parameters of a magnetic SAF texture, those being its period, its type (Néel or Bloch), and its chirality (clockwise or counterclockwise), can be directly determined using the circular dichroism in x-ray resonant scattering at half-integer multilayer Bragg peaks in reciprocal space. The analysis of the dependence in temperature down to 40 K allows us moreover to address the question of the temperature stability of a spin spiral in a SAF sample and of the temperature scaling of the symmetric and antisymmetric exchange interactions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112375638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevB.104.L060402
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevB.104.L060402
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85112375638
VL - 104
JO - Physical Review B
JF - Physical Review B
SN - 2469-9950
IS - 6
M1 - L060402
ER -