Abstract
Research on proximity effects in superconductor/ferromagnetic hybrids has most often focused on how superconducting properties are affected—and can be controlled—by the effects of the ferromagnet’s exchange or magnetic fringe fields. The opposite, namely the possibility to craft, tailor and stabilize the magnetic texture in a ferromagnet by exploiting superconducting effects, has been more seldom explored. Here we show that the magnetic flux trapped in high-temperature superconducting YBa2Cu3O7-δ microstructures can be used to modify the magnetic reversal of a hard ferromagnet—a cobalt/platinum multilayer with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy—and to imprint unusual magnetic domain distributions in a controlled manner via the magnetic field history. The domain distributions imprinted in the superconducting state remain stable, in absence of an external magnetic field, even after increasing the temperature well above the superconducting critical temperature, at variance to what has been observed for soft ferromagnets with in-plane magnetic anisotropy. This opens the possibility of having non-trivial magnetic configuration textures at room temperature after being tailored below the superconducting transition temperature. The observed effects are well explained by micromagnetic simulations that demonstrate the role played by the magnetic field from the superconductor on the nucleation, propagation, and stabilization of magnetic domains.
Highlights
Research on proximity effects in superconductor/ferromagnetic hybrids has most often focused on how superconducting properties are affected—and can be controlled—by the effects of the ferromagnet’s exchange or magnetic fringe fields
The magnetic domain pattern imaged by X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD)-photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) is similar to that observed by means of magnetic force microscopy (MFM) on a Co/ Pt multilayer with the same structure as the one used for the PEEM experiments and characteristic of systems with perpendicular magnetic a nisotropy[32]
We have shown the possibility to generate variable magnetization patterns in perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) Co/Pt multilayers by means of superconducting stray fields which are stable in the absence of an external magnetic field
Summary
Research on proximity effects in superconductor/ferromagnetic hybrids has most often focused on how superconducting properties are affected—and can be controlled—by the effects of the ferromagnet’s exchange or magnetic fringe fields. While conventional superconductivity requires the antiparallel alignment of the electron’s spin in (singlet) Cooper pairs, ferromagnetism favors their parallel arrangement This has motivated the investigation of superconductor/ferromagnet (SC/FM) interactions in hybrids such as multilayers where superconductivity and ferromagnetism reside in different layers. Both theoretical and experimental, have shown the possibility to use SCs to craft nontrivial magnetization textures, stable at zero magnetic field, in adjacent ferromagnets with lateral dimensions ranging from field from the tshuepenracnoon9d–1u1cttoorth−→HeSmC (icxr,yo)-,swcahleic1h2–1i4s Such effect stems from the inhomogeneous magnetic created either directly by superconducting v ortices[9,10,11] stray or by the circulation of screening supercurrents[12,13,14] and the penetration and pinning of magnetic flux quanta[15,16]. Recent experiments exploit this SC/FM interaction to characterize superconducting film properties using the ferromagnetic layer as a magneto-optically active material[24], or to imprint magnetic unusual spin textures such as the recently reported skyrmion-like magnetic domain configurations in soft ferromagnets[10]
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