Abstract
The control of the spin orientation in antiferromagnets is of key importance in modern spintronics. Here, the authors demonstrate controllable antiferromagnetic spin switching in a synthetically fabricated epitaxial ferromagnet/antiferromagnet bilayer. Thanks to the precise nanoengineering of ferromagnet anisotropy and interface exchange coupling, two orthogonal spin states in the antiferromagnet can be either thermally stabilized in a field-free manner or written by a small external magnetic field.
Highlights
During the past decades most of the spintronic applications relied on the manipulation of magnetic moments in ferromagnets (FM) [1], with antiferromagnets (AFM) [2] acting as passive elements only, for example as pinning layers in spin valves
We find that the magnetic moments in NiO are rotatable within the NiO(111) sample plane and both magnetic anisotropy and orientation of antiferromagnetic NiO spins are determined by the magnetic properties of underlying ferromagnetic Fe layer
Additional low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) analysis was performed for NiO/(50 Å Fe) and NiO/(150 Å Fe) regions of the sample, which was a subject of further magnetic characterization
Summary
During the past decades most of the spintronic applications relied on the manipulation of magnetic moments in ferromagnets (FM) [1], with antiferromagnets (AFM) [2] acting as passive elements only, for example as pinning layers in spin valves. [40,49,50,51], which determines a rotation the Fe easy axis from [11 ̄0] to the bulk-like [001] in-plane direction, proves to be especially advantageous for our purposes Such [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] to [001] SRT can be driven either by increasing the Fe thickness [52] or decreasing the temperature [53] and is observed in Fe(110) films coupled to an AFM layer, as we have recently reported for CoO(111)/Fe(110) [54,55] and NiO(111)/Fe(110) bilayers [56]. We prove that the AFM magnetic state is fully determined by the current state of the FM component, and it can be controlled either thermally in a field-free manner or by means of very small external magnetic fields, orders of magnitude smaller than the reported spin-flop fields [19,23]
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