Interfacial control of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in heavy metal/ferromagnetic metal thin film heterostructures

Abstract

The interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in ultrathin magnetic thin film heterostructures provides a new approach for controlling spin textures on mesoscopic length scales. Here we investigate the dependence of the interfacial DMI constant $D$ on a Pt wedge insertion layer in Ta/CoFeB/Pt(wedge)/MgO thin films by observing the asymmetric spin-wave dispersion using Brillouin light scattering. Continuous tuning of $D$ by more than a factor of 3 is realized by inserting less than one monolayer of Pt. The observations provide new insights for designing magnetic thin film heterostructures with tailored $D$ for controlling skyrmions and magnetic domain-wall chirality and dynamics.