Engineering of Heterostructure Pt/Co/AlOx for the enhancement of Dyzaloshinskii-Moria interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cobalt oxidation at the Pt/Co/AlOx interface influences the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, which is crucial for stabilizing chiral magnetic textures in spintronic devices.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the effects of cobalt oxidation on DMI in Pt/Co/AlOx structures, using multiple measurement techniques and correlating chemical and magnetic properties.

Findings

Cobalt oxidation enhances DMI strength.

Post-growth annealing modifies interfacial oxidation and DMI.

Results inform magnetic film design for MRAM applications.

Abstract

The interfacial Dyzaloshinskii-Moria interaction (DMI) helps to stabilize chiral domain walls and magnetic skyrmions, which will facilitate new magnetic memories and spintronics logic devices. The study of interfacial DMI in perpendicularly magnetized structurally asymmetric heavy metal (HM) / ferromagnetic (FM) multilayer systems is of high importance due to the formation of chiral magnetic textures in the presence of DMI. Here, we report the impact of the cobalt oxidation at the cobalt -aluminum oxide interface in Pt/Co/AlOx trilayer structure on the DMI by varying the post-growth annealing time and Aluminum thickness. For quantifying DMI, we employed magneto-optical imaging of asymmetric domain wall expansion, hysteresis loop shift, and spin-wave spectroscopy techniques. We further correlated the Cobalt oxidation with low-temperature Hall effect measurements and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Our results emphasize the characterization of magnetic films for MRAM technologies semiconductor temperature process window, where magnetic interaction will be critical for device performance.