Long-range chiral exchange interaction in synthetic antiferromagnets
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Abstract
The exchange interaction governs static and dynamic magnetism. This fundamental interaction comes in two flavours-symmetric and antisymmetric. the symmetric interaction leads to ferro- and antiferromagnetism, and the antisymmetric interaction has attracted significant interest owing to its major role in promoting topologically non-trivial spin textures that promise fast, energy-efficient devices. so far, the antisymmetric exchange interaction has been found to be rather short ranged and limited to a single magnetic layer. here we report a long-range antisymmetric interlayer exchange interaction in perpendicularly magnetized synthetic antiferromagnets with parallel and antiparallel magnetization alignments. asymmetric hysteresis loops under an in-plane field reveal a unidirectional and chiral nature of this interaction, which results in canted magnetic structures. we explain our results by considering spin-orbit coupling combined with reduced symmetry in multilayers. our discovery of a long-range chiral interaction provides an additional handle to engineer magnetic structures and could enable three-dimensional topological structures.
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Nature materials, 18, 7, Nature Publishing Group, Basingstoke, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0370-z