Epitaxial Integration of a Perpendicularly Magnetized Ferrimagnetic Metal on a Ferroelectric oxide for Electric-Field Control

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the epitaxial growth of a ferrimagnetic Mn2Ga film on MgO and its integration with ferroelectric substrates, enabling electric-field control of magnetic properties for spintronic applications.

Contribution

It reports the first successful epitaxial integration of a perpendicularly magnetized ferrimagnet with ferroelectric oxide, enabling electric control of magnetic properties.

Findings

Epitaxial Mn2Ga films exhibit strong anomalous Hall effect.

Electric fields can nonvolatily modulate the AHE over a wide temperature range.

The integration paves the way for low-power spintronic devices.

Abstract

Ferrimagnets, which contain the advantages of both ferromagnets (detectable moments) and antiferromagnets (ultrafast spin dynamics), have recently attracted great attention. Here we report the optimization of epitaxial growth of a tetragonal perpendicularly magnetized ferrimagnet Mn2Ga on MgO. Electrical transport, magnetic properties and the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) were systematically studied. Furthermore, we successfully integrated high-quality epitaxial ferrimagnetic Mn2Ga thin films onto ferroelectric PMN-PT single crystals with a MgO buffer layer. It was found that the AHE of such a ferrimagnet can be effectively modulated by a small electric field over a large temperature range in a nonvolatile manner. This work thus demonstrates the great potential of ferrimagnets for developing high-density and low-power spintronic devices.