Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Induced Spin-Transfer Torques in Kagome Antiferromagnets

TL;DR

This paper predicts a new mechanism for manipulating antiferromagnetic domain walls in kagome AFMs via Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, enabling enhanced control of spin textures for spintronic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupling mechanism between spin currents and antiferromagnetic textures in kagome AFMs with broken mirror symmetry, expanding the understanding of spin-transfer torques.

Findings

DMI renormalizes spin-wave stiffness and anisotropy energies in kagome AFMs.

DMI induces a twisted domain wall profile controllable by spin accumulation.

Enhanced tunability of current-driven domain wall motion compared to ferromagnets and collinear AFMs.

Abstract

In recent years antiferromagnets (AFMs) have become very promising for nanoscale spintronic applications due to their unique properties such as THz dynamics and absence of stray fields. Manipulating antiferromagnetic textures is currently, however, limited to very few exceptional material symmetry classes allowing for staggered torques on the magnetic sublattices. In this work, we predict for kagome AFMs with broken mirror symmetry a new coupling mechanism between antiferromagnetic domain walls (DWs) and spin currents, produced by the relativistic Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). We microscopically derive the DMI's free energy contribution for the kagome AFMs. Unlike ferromagnets and collinear AFMs, the DMI does not lead to terms linear in the spatial derivatives but instead renormalizes the spin-wave stiffness and anisotropy energies. Importantly, we show that the DMI induces a highly nontrivial twisted DW profile that is controllable via two linearly independent components of the spin accumulation. This texture manipulation mechanism goes beyond the concept of staggered torques and implies a higher degree of tunability for the current-driven DW motion compared to conventional ferromagnets and collinear AFMs.