Interface-induced phenomena in magnetism

TLDR

Key concepts in interfacial magnetism are spin accumulation, spin currents, spin transfer torque, and spin pumping. The article reviews recent progress in interfacial magnetism, focusing on spin‑orbit coupling, symmetry breaking, and promising future research directions. The review surveys how interfaces modify magnetic properties and charge/spin transport, covering exchange bias, exchange spring magnets, spin Hall effect, oxide heterostructures, and topological insulators. Recent discoveries include interface‑induced magnetism, non‑collinear spin textures, nonlinear spin‑torque dynamics, magnetization reversal, and ultrafast interfacial effects.

Abstract

This article reviews static and dynamic interfacial effects in magnetism, focusing on interfacially-driven magnetic effects and phenomena associated with spin-orbit coupling and intrinsic symmetry breaking at interfaces. It provides a historical background and literature survey, but focuses on recent progress, identifying the most exciting new scientific results and pointing to promising future research directions. It starts with an introduction and overview of how basic magnetic properties are affected by interfaces, then turns to a discussion of charge and spin transport through and near interfaces and how these can be used to control the properties of the magnetic layer. Important concepts include spin accumulation, spin currents, spin transfer torque, and spin pumping. An overview is provided to the current state of knowledge and existing review literature on interfacial effects such as exchange bias, exchange spring magnets, spin Hall effect, oxide heterostructures, and topological insulators. The article highlights recent discoveries of interface-induced magnetism and non-collinear spin textures, non-linear dynamics including spin torque transfer and magnetization reversal induced by interfaces, and interfacial effects in ultrafast magnetization processes.