
Physikalische Chemie - Direktor: Prof. Dr. Martin Wolf
Informal Seminar
Host: Tommaso Pincelli
Tuesday, October 22, 2024, 9:00 am
PC Seminar Room, G 2.06, Faradayweg 4
Rohit Sharma
Freie Universität Berlin
Probing interfacial Dzyaloshinkii-Moriya interaction in FM thin films
Moore’s law which relates the number of transistors in an integrated circuit as doubling in number about every two years is said to be slowing down due to quantum confinement effects. Increased data acquisition capabilities and the use of advanced AI that requires high computing power have imposed additional demands of faster read-write memory devices. To meet these challenges, high speed cost effective computing solutions are being pursued by academia and industry. Novel families of devices called racetrack memory devices have been proposed as possible solutions that work on the principle of magnetic domain wall motion (dw). These dw’s can encode data and are moved over separate reading and writing regions using spin polarized electron currents. To build such devices it is essential to understand the underlying phenomena concerning formation of dw’s and their motion. Formation of dw’s in ferromagnetic systems with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) and broken inversion symmetry (ISB) have shown to give rise to the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (i-DMI). Although predicted in 1958-1960, the physics underlying DMI have been experimentally elusive in magnetic thin films owing to the lack of fabrication techniques to realise samples meeting Moriya’s conditions for DMI. Over the past decade there has been a renewed interest in studying DMI because of improvements in sample growth technology. In ultrathin films, DMI breaks the degeneracy of the magnetic dw energy with respect to the chirality under the application of an in-plane magnetic field. The presence of DMI have been shown to give rise to novel chiral structures like skyrmions. These novel objects have been shown to be prime candidates for racetrack memory, homochiral dw’s and spintronic devices. Owing to the central role played by DMI in stabilising novel structures important for future technology motivates a complete understanding of the interfacial DMI for varying thickness of the ferromagnetic layer, varying temperature regimes and differing probing thechniques. Such studies have been lacking owing to the variable contributions of many physical effects to DMI and exhaustive theoretical understanding of DMI. These contributing factors like spin magnetic moment ms and the intra atomic dipole moment mD for instance although individually well understood interact in complex ways at different temperature regimes and can be probed with different techniques. In this thesis, we propose a MOKE microscopy, Kondorsky measurements of the i-DMI field at room and cryogenic temperatures. These measuremennts will be performed using Anomalous Hall probe designed for this thesis.