title: Tailoring the chirality of magnetic domain walls by interface engineering.
abstract: Contacting ferromagnetic films with normal metals changes how magnetic textures respond to electric currents, enabling surprisingly fast domain wall motions and spin texture-dependent propagation direction. These effects are attributed to domain wall chirality induced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction at interfaces, which suggests rich possibilities to influence domain wall dynamics if the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can be adjusted. Chiral magnetism was seen in several film structures on appropriately chosen substrates where interfacial spin-orbit-coupling effects are strong. Here we use real-space imaging to visualize chiral domain walls in cobalt/nickel multilayers in contact with platinum and iridium. We show that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can be adjusted to stabilize either left-handed or right-handed Néel walls, or non-chiral Bloch walls by adjusting an interfacial spacer layer between the multilayers and the substrate. Our findings introduce domain wall chirality as a new degree of freedom, which may open up new opportunities for spintronics device designs.
authors.affiliation: National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Gong
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Tianping
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Alpha T
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: N'Diaye
authors.forename: Heeyoung
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kwon
authors.forename: Changyeon
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Won
authors.forename: Yizheng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Andreas K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Schmid