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Version: publishedVersion × Publisher: College Park, MD : APS × WGL Institute: IFWD ×

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    Multistate current-induced magnetization switching in Au/Fe/MgO(001) epitaxial heterostructures
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2021) Gospodarič, P.; Młyńczak, E.; Soldatov, I.; Kákay, A.; Bürgler, D.E.; Plucinski, L.; Schäfer, R.; Fassbender, J.; Schneider, C.M.
    Magnetization switching using in-plane charge current recently has been widely investigated in heavy metal/ferromagnet bilayers with the switching mechanism usually attributed to the action of the spin-orbit coupling. Here we study in-plane current induced magnetization switching in model epitaxial bilayers that consist of Au(001) and Fe(001) grown on MgO(001). We use the planar Hall effect combined with magnetooptical Kerr effect (MOKE) microscopy to investigate magnetic properties of the bilayers and current-induced switching. We show that a current density beyond 1.4×107 A/cm can be employed for reproducible electrical switching of the magnetization between multiple stable states that correspond to different arrangements of magnetic domains with magnetization direction along one of the in-plane easy magnetization axes of the Fe(001) film. Lower current densities result in stable intermediate transversal resistances which are interpreted based on MOKE-microscopy investigations as resulting from the current-induced magnetic domain structure that is formed in the area of the Hall cross. We find that the physical mechanism of the current-induced magnetization switching of the Au/Fe/MgO(001) system at room temperature can be fully explained by the Oersted field, which is generated by the charge current flowing mostly through the Au layer.
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    Magnetic warping in topological insulators
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Naselli, Gabriele; Moghaddam, Ali G.; Di Napoli, Solange; Vildosola, Verónica; Fulga, Ion Cosma; van den Brink, Jeroen; Facio, Jorge I.
    We analyze the electronic structure of topological surface states in the family of magnetic topological insulators MnBi2nTe3n+1. We show that, at natural-cleavage surfaces, the Dirac cone warping changes its symmetry from hexagonal to trigonal at the magnetic ordering temperature. In particular, an energy splitting develops between the surface states of the same band index but opposite surface momenta upon formation of the long-range magnetic order. As a consequence, measurements of such energy splittings constitute a simple protocol to detect the magnetic ordering via the surface electronic structure, alternative to the detection of the surface magnetic gap. Interestingly, while the latter signals a nonzero surface magnetization, the trigonal warping predicted here is, in addition, sensitive to the direction of the surface magnetic flux. Our results may be particularly useful when the Dirac point is buried in the projection of the bulk states, caused by certain terminations of the crystal or in hole-doped systems, since in both situations the surface magnetic gap itself is not accessible in photoemission experiments.
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    Topological boundaries between helical domains as a nucleation source of skyrmions in the bulk cubic helimagnet Cu2OSeO3
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Leonov, A.O.; Pappas, C.
    Cu2OSeO3 represents a unique example in the family of B20 cubic helimagnets with a tilted spiral and a low-temperature skyrmion phase arising for magnetic fields applied along the easy crystallographic (100) axes. Although the stabilization mechanism of these phases can be accounted for by cubic magnetic anisotropy, the skyrmion nucleation process is still an open question, since the stability region of the skyrmion phase displays strongly hysteretic behavior with different phase boundaries for increasing and decreasing magnetic fields. Here, we address this important point using micromagnetic simulations and come to the conclusion that skyrmion nucleation is underpinned by the reorientation of spiral domains occurring near the critical magnetic fields of the phase diagrams: HC1, the critical field of the transition between the helical and conical/tiled spiral phase, and HC2, the critical field between the conical/tiled spiral and the homogenous phase. By studying a wide variety of cases we show that domain walls may have a 3D structure. Moreover, they can carry a finite topological charge stemming from half-skyrmions (merons) also permitting along-the-field and perpendicular-to-the-field orientation. Thus, domain walls may be envisioned as nucleation source of skyrmions that can form thermodynamically stable and metastable lattices as well as skyrmion networks with misaligned skyrmion tubes. The results of numerical simulations are discussed in view of recent experimental data on chiral magnets, in particular, for the bulk cubic helimagnet Cu2OSeO3.
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    Absence of induced magnetic monopoles in Maxwellian magnetoelectrics
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Nogueira, Flavio S.; van den Brink, Jeroen
    The electromagnetic response of topological insulators is governed by axion electrodynamics, which features a topological magnetoelectric term in the Maxwell equations. As a consequence magnetic fields become the source of electric fields and vice versa, a phenomenon that is general for any material exhibiting a linear magnetoelectric effect. Axion electrodynamics has been associated with the possibility to create magnetic monopoles, in particular, by an electrical charge that is screened above the surface of a magnetoelectric material. Here we explicitly solve for the electromagnetic fields in this geometry and show that while vortexlike magnetic screening fields are generated by the electrical charge their divergence is identically zero at every point in space, which implies an absence of induced magnetic monopoles. Nevertheless magnetic image charges can be made explicit in the problem, and even if no bound state with electric charges yielding a dyon arises, a dyonlike angular momentum follows from our analysis. Because of its dependence on the dielectric constant this angular momentum is not quantized, which is consistent with a general argument that precludes magnetic monopoles to be generated in Maxwell magnetoelectrics. We also solve for topologically protected zero modes in the Dirac equation induced by the point charge. Since the induced topological defect on the topological insulator's surface carries an electric charge as a result of the axion term, these zero modes are not self-conjugated.
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    Strong effects of uniaxial pressure and short-range correlations in Cr2Ge2Te6
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Spachmann, S.; Elghandour, A.; Selter, S.; Büchner, B.; Aswartham, S.; Klingeler, R.
    Cr2Ge2Te6 is a quasi-two-dimensional semiconducting van der Waals ferromagnet down to the bilayer with great potential for technological applications. Engineering the critical temperature to achieve room-temperature applications is one of the critical next steps on this path. Here, we report high-resolution capacitance dilatometry studies on Cr2Ge2Te6 single crystals which directly prove significant magnetoelastic coupling and provide quantitative values of the large uniaxial pressure effects on long-range magnetic order (∂TC/∂pc=24.7 K/GPa and ∂TC/∂pab=−15.6 K/GPa) derived from thermodynamic relations. Moderate in-plane strain is thus sufficient to strongly enhance ferromagnetism in Cr2Ge2Te6 up to room temperature. Moreover, unambiguous signs of short-range magnetic order up to 200 K are found.
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    Intercalant-mediated Kitaev exchange in Ag3LiIr2O6
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Yadav, Ravi; Reja, Sahinur; Ray, Rajyavardhan; van den Brink, Jeroen; Nishimoto, Satoshi; Yazyev, Oleg V.
    The recently synthesized Ag3LiIr2O6 has been proposed as a Kitaev magnet in proximity to the quantum spin liquid phase. We explore its microscopic Hamiltonian and magnetic ground state using many-body quantum chemistry methods and exact diagonalization techniques. Our calculations establish a dominant bond dependent ferromagnetic Kitaev exchange between Ir sites and find that the inclusion of Ag 4d orbitals in the configuration interaction calculations strikingly enhances the Kitaev exchange. Furthermore, using exact diagonalization of the nearest-neighbor fully anisotropic J−K−Γ Hamiltonian, we obtain the magnetic phase diagram as a function of further neighbor couplings. We find that the antiferromagnetic off-diagonal coupling stabilizes long range order, but the structure factor calculations suggest that the material is very close to the quantum spin liquid phase and the ordered state can easily collapse into a liquid by small perturbations such as structural distortion or bond disorder.
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    Thermalization by a synthetic horizon
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Mertens, Lotte; Moghaddam, Ali G.; Chernyavsky, Dmitry; Morice, Corentin; van den Brink, Jeroen; van Wezel, Jasper
    Synthetic horizons in models for quantum matter provide an alternative route to explore fundamental questions of modern gravitational theory. Here we apply these concepts to the problem of emergence of thermal quantum states in the presence of a horizon, by studying ground-state thermalization due to instantaneous horizon creation in a gravitational setting and its condensed matter analog. By a sudden quench to position-dependent hopping amplitudes in a one-dimensional lattice model, we establish the emergence of a thermal state accompanying the formation of a synthetic horizon. The resulting temperature for long chains is shown to be identical to the corresponding Unruh temperature, provided that the postquench Hamiltonian matches the entanglement Hamiltonian of the prequench system. Based on detailed analysis of the outgoing radiation we formulate the conditions required for the synthetic horizon to behave as a purely thermal source, paving a way to explore this interplay of quantum-mechanical and gravitational aspects experimentally.
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    Topological Hall effect in thin films of Mn1.5PtSn
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2019) Swekis, Peter; Markou, Anastasios; Kriegner, Dominik; Gayles, Jacob; Schlitz, Richard; Schnelle, Walter; Goennenwein, Sebastian T.B.; Felser, Claudia
    Spin chirality in metallic materials with noncoplanar magnetic order can give rise to a Berry phase induced topological Hall effect. Here, we report the observation of a large topological Hall effect in high-quality films of Mn1.5PtSn that were grown by means of magnetron sputtering on MgO(001). The topological Hall resistivity is present up to μ0H≈4T below the spin reorientation transition temperature, Ts=185 K. We find that the maximum topological Hall resistivity is of comparable magnitude as the anomalous Hall resistivity. Owing to the size, the topological Hall effect is directly evident prior to the customarily performed subtraction of magnetometry data. Further, we underline the robustness of the topological Hall effect in Mn2-xPtSn by extracting the effect for multiple stoichiometries (x=0.5,0.25,0.1) and film thicknesses (t=104,52,35 nm) with maximum topological Hall resistivities between 0.76 and 1.55μΩcm at 150 K. © 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
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    Inhomogeneous ferromagnetism mimics signatures of the topological Hall effect in SrRuO3 films
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2020) Kim, Gideok; Son, K.; Suyolcu, Y.E.; Miao, L.; Schreiber, N.J.; Nair, H.P.; Putzky, D.; Minola, M.; Christiani, G.; van Aken, P.A.; Shen, K.M.; Schlom, D.G.; Logvenov, G.; Keimer, B.
    Topological transport phenomena in magnetic materials are a major topic of current condensed matter research. One of the most widely studied phenomena is the topological Hall effect (THE), which is generated via spin-orbit interactions between conduction electrons and topological spin textures such as skyrmions. We report a comprehensive set of Hall effect and magnetization measurements on epitaxial films of the prototypical ferromagnetic metal SrRuO3 the magnetic and transport properties of which were systematically modulated by varying the concentration of Ru vacancies. We observe Hall effect anomalies that closely resemble signatures of the THE, but a quantitative analysis demonstrates that they result from inhomogeneities in the ferromagnetic magnetization caused by a nonrandom distribution of Ru vacancies. As such inhomogeneities are difficult to avoid and are rarely characterized independently, our results call into question the identification of topological spin textures in numerous prior transport studies of quantum materials, heterostructures, and devices. Firm conclusions regarding the presence of such textures must meet stringent conditions such as probes that couple directly to the noncollinear magnetization on the atomic scale.
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    Evidence for a percolative Mott insulator-metal transition in doped Sr2IrO4
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2021) Sun, Zhixiang; Guevara, Jose M.; Sykora, Steffen; Pärschke, Ekaterina M.; Manna, Kaustuv; Maljuk, Andrey; Wurmehl, Sabine; van den Brink, Jeroen; Büchner, Bernd; Hess, Christian
    Despite many efforts to rationalize the strongly correlated electronic ground states in doped Mott insulators, the nature of the doping-induced insulator-to-metal transition is still a subject under intensive investigation. Here, we probe the nanoscale electronic structure of the Mott insulator Sr2IrO4−δ with low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and find an enhanced local density of states (LDOS) inside the Mott gap at the location of individual defects which we interpret as defects at apical oxygen sites. A chiral behavior in the topography for those defects has been observed. We also visualize the local enhanced conductance arising from the overlapping of defect states which induces finite LDOS inside of the Mott gap. By combining these findings with the typical spatial extension of isolated defects of about 2 nm, our results indicate that the insulator-to-metal transition in Sr2IrO4−δ could be percolative in nature.