Intrinsic mixed Bloch-N\'eel character and chirality switch of skyrmions in asymmetric epitaxial trilayer

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how a simple asymmetric trilayer system can stabilize skyrmions with mixed Bloch-Néel character and induce chirality switching by varying the ferromagnetic layer thickness, advancing spintronics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal epitaxial trilayer model that stabilizes skyrmions with intrinsic mixed chirality and reveals thickness-dependent chirality switching, unlike complex multilayer systems.

Findings

Skyrmions with mixed Bloch-Néel character are stabilized for Co thickness > 3.6 nm.

Chirality of skyrmions switches from counter-clockwise to clockwise for Co thickness > 5.4 nm.

Layer-resolved micromagnetic modeling explains the stabilization and switching phenomena.

Abstract

Recent advances on the stabilization and manipulation of chiral magnetization configurations in systems consisting in alternating atomic layers of ferromagnetic and non-magnetic materials hold promise of innovation in spintronics technology. The low dimensionality of the systems promotes spin orbit driven interfacial effects like antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI) and surface magnetic anisotropy, whose relative strengths may be tuned to achieve stable nanometer sized magnetic objects with fixed chirality. While in most of the cases this is obtained by engineering complex multilayers stacks in which interlayer dipolar fields become important, we consider here a simple epitaxial trilayer in which a ferromagnet, with variable thickness, is embedded between a heavy metal and graphene. The latter enhances the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of the system, promotes a Rashba-type DMI, and can sustain very long spin diffusion length. We use a layer-resolved micromagnetic model (LRM) to describe the magnetization textures and their chirality. Our results demonstrate that for Co thickness larger than 3.6 nm, a skyrmion having an intrinsic mixed Bloch-N\'eel character with counter-clock-wise chirality is stabilized in the entire (single) Co layer. Noteworthy, for thicknesses larger than 5.4 nm, the skyrmion switches its chirality, from counter-clock-wise to clock-wise.