Emerging magnetism and anomalous Hall effect in iridate-manganite heterostructures

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that strong interfacial coupling in 3d-5d oxide heterostructures induces emergent magnetism and anomalous Hall effects, revealing new physical phenomena not present in bulk materials.

Contribution

It uncovers the significant interfacial ferromagnetism and anomalous Hall effect in SrMnO3/SrIrO3 heterostructures driven by charge transfer, highlighting novel phenomena in low-dimensional oxide interfaces.

Findings

Enormous interfacial coupling between SrMnO3 and SrIrO3

Emergent ferromagnetism at the interface

Observation of anomalous Hall response

Abstract

Strong Coulomb repulsion and spin-orbit coupling are known to give rise to exotic physical phenomena in transition metal oxides. Initial attempts to investigate systems where both of these fundamental interactions are comparably strong, such as 3d and 5d complex oxide superlattices, have revealed properties that only slightly differ from the bulk ones of the constituent materials. Here, we observe that the interfacial coupling between the 3d antiferromagnetic insulator SrMnO3 and the 5d paramagnetic metal SrIrO3 is enormously strong, yielding an anomalous Hall response as the result of charge transfer driven interfacial ferromagnetism. These findings show that low dimensional spin-orbit entangled 3d-5d interfaces provide an avenue to uncover technologically relevant physical phenomena unattainable in bulk materials.