Quantitative imaging of hybrid chiral spin textures in magnetic multilayer systems by Lorentz microscopy

TL;DR

This paper uses Lorentz microscopy to quantitatively analyze hybrid chiral spin textures in magnetic multilayers, revealing the coexistence of Neel and Bloch components and advancing understanding for spintronic applications.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental quantification of Neel and Bloch contributions in hybrid chiral spin textures in multilayer systems.

Findings

Quantitative measurement of Neel and Bloch contributions in hybrid textures

Excellent agreement between experimental results and simulations

Identification of Bloch wall components in complex spin textures

Abstract

Chiral magnetic textures in ultrathin perpendicularly magnetised multilayer film stacks with an interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction have been the focus of much research recently. The chirality associated with the broken inversion symmetry at the interface between an ultrathin ferromagnetic layer and a heavy metal with large spin-orbit coupling supports homochiral N\'eel domain walls and hedgehog (N\'eel) skyrmions. Under spin-orbit torques these N\'eel type magnetic structures are predicted, and have been measured, to move at high velocities. However recent studies have indicated that some multilayered systems may possess a more complex hybrid domain wall configuration, due to the competition between interfacial DMI and interlayer dipolar fields. These twisted textures are expected to have thickness dependent N\'eel and Bloch contributions to the domain or skyrmion walls. In this work, we use the methods of Lorentz microscopy to measure quantitatively for the first time experimentally both; i) the contributions of the N\'eel and Bloch contributions and ii) their spatial spin variation at high resolution. These are compared with modelled and simulated structures which are in excellent agreement with our experimental results. Our quantitative analysis provides powerful direct evidence of the Bloch wall component which exists in these hybrid walls and will be significant when exploiting such phenomena in spintronic applications.