Micromagnetic Modeling of Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction in Spin Hall Effect Switching

Abstract

Recent developments in the field of spin orbitronics have demonstrated the feasibility of manipulating the magnetization in a ferromagnet by using electrical currents. Specifically, an in-plane current injected into a heavy-metal/ferromagnet bilayer with perpendicular anisotropy is able to induce reversal of the magnetization. Here we perform micromagnetic simulations to numerically study the dynamics of the magnetization in spin Hall effect-driven switching under the influence of an antisymmetric exchange interaction, namely the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. We investigate the time evolution of the magnetization during the switching under different circumstances, and study the configuration of the transient magnetic structures which are formed: bubbles, half-skyrmions, and full skyrmions.