Search Results
From Colossal to Zero: Controlling the Anomalous Hall Effect in Magnetic Heusler Compounds via Berry Curvature Design
2018, Manna, K., Muechler, L., Kao, T.-H., Stinshoff, R., Zhang, Y., Gooth, J., Kumar, N., Kreiner, G., Koepernik, K., Car, R., Kübler, J., Fecher, G.H., Shekhar, C., Sun, Y., Felser, C.
Since the discovery of the anomalous Hall effect (AHE), the anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) has been thought to be zero when there is no net magnetization. However, the recently found relation between the intrinsic AHE and the Berry curvature predicts other possibilities, such as a large AHC in noncolinear antiferromagnets with no net magnetization but net Berry curvature. Vice versa, the AHE in principle could be tuned to zero, irrespective of a finite magnetization. Here, we experimentally investigate this possibility and demonstrate that the symmetry elements of Heusler magnets can be changed such that the Berry curvature and all the associated properties are switched while leaving the magnetization unaffected. This enables us to tune the AHC from 0 Ω-1 cm-1 up to 1600 Ω-1 cm-1 with an exceptionally high anomalous Hall angle up to 12%, while keeping the magnetization the same. Our study shows that the AHC can be controlled by selectively changing the Berry curvature distribution, independent of the magnetization.
Focus on nonlinear terahertz studies
2014, Leitenstorfer, A., Nelson, K.A., Reimann, K., Tanaka, K.
Resulting from the availability of improved sources, research in the terahertz (THz) spectral range has increased dramatically over the last decade, leading essentially to the disappearance of the so-called 'THz gap'. While most work to date has been carried out with THz radiation of low field amplitude, a growing number of experiments are using THz radiation with large electric and magnetic fields that induce nonlinearities in the system under study. This 'focus on' collection contains a number of articles, both experimental and theoretical, in the new subfield of THz nonlinear optics and spectroscopy on various systems, among them molecular gases, superconductors, semiconductors, antiferromagnets and graphene.
Two types of magnetic shape-memory effects from twinned microstructure and magneto-structural coupling in Fe1 +yTe
2019, Rößler, S., Koz, C., Wang, Z., Skourski, Y., Doerr, M., Kasinathan, D., Rosner, H., Schmidt, M., Schwarz, U., Rößler, U.K., Wirth, S.
A detailed experimental investigation of Fe1+yTe (y = 0.11, 0.12) using pulsed magnetic fields up to 60 T confirms remarkable magnetic shape-memory (MSM) effects. These effects result from magnetoelastic transformation processes in the low-temperature antiferromagnetic state of these materials. The observation of modulated and finely twinned microstructure at the nanoscale through scanning tunneling microscopy establishes a behavior similar to that of thermoelastic martensite. We identified the observed, elegant hierarchical twinning pattern of monoclinic crystallographic domains as an ideal realization of crossing twin bands. The antiferromagnetism of the monoclinic ground state allows for a magnetic-field–induced reorientation of these twin variants by the motion of one type of twin boundaries. At sufficiently high magnetic fields, we observed a second isothermal transformation process with large hysteresis for different directions of applied field. This gives rise to a second MSM effect caused by a phase transition back to the field-polarized tetragonal lattice state.
Nanomagnetism of Magnetoelectric Granular Thin-Film Antiferromagnets
2019, Appel, Patrick, Shields, Brendan J., Kosub, Tobias, Hedrich, Natascha, Hübner, René, Faßbender, Jürgen, Makarov, Denys, Maletinsky, Patrick
Antiferromagnets have recently emerged as attractive platforms for spintronics applications, offering fundamentally new functionalities compared with their ferromagnetic counterparts. Whereas nanoscale thin-film materials are key to the development of future antiferromagnetic spintronic technologies, existing experimental tools tend to suffer from low resolution or expensive and complex equipment requirements. We offer a simple, high-resolution alternative by addressing the ubiquitous surface magnetization of magnetoelectric antiferromagnets in a granular thin-film sample on the nanoscale using single-spin magnetometry in combination with spin-sensitive transport experiments. Specifically, we quantitatively image the evolution of individual nanoscale antiferromagnetic domains in 200 nm thin films of Cr 2 O 3 in real space and across the paramagnet-to-antiferromagnet phase transition, finding an average domain size of 230 nm, several times larger than the average grain size in the film. These experiments allow us to discern key properties of the Cr 2 O 3 thin film, including the boundary magnetic moment density, the variation of critical temperature throughout the film, the mechanism of domain formation, and the strength of exchange coupling between individual grains comprising the film. Our work offers novel insights into the magnetic ordering mechanism of Cr 2 O 3 and firmly establishes single-spin magnetometry as a versatile and widely applicable tool for addressing antiferromagnetic thin films on the nanoscale. © 2019 American Chemical Society.
Spin Hall effect emerging from a noncollinear magnetic lattice without spin-orbit coupling
2018, Zhang, Y., Železný, J., Sun, Y., Van Den Brink, J., Yan, B.
The spin Hall effect (SHE), which converts a charge current into a transverse spin current, has long been believed to be a phenomenon induced by spin-orbit coupling. Here, we identify an alternative mechanism to realize the intrinsic SHE through a noncollinear magnetic structure that breaks the spin rotation symmetry. No spin-orbit coupling is needed even when the scalar spin chirality vanishes, different from the case of the topological Hall effect and topological SHE reported previously. In known noncollinear antiferromagnetic compounds Mn3X (X = Ga, Ge, and Sn), for example, we indeed obtain large spin Hall conductivities based on ab initio calculations.