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technical paper
Clarifying the Origin of Charge to
Spin current is one of the key technologies for spintronics devices. Especially, generation of spin currents via electrical charge current has attracted a great deal of attentions from both fundamental physics and application point of views because it can manipulate magnetization vector of the ferromagnet 1. This charge-to-spin conversion phenomena originate from spin-orbit coupling and has been widely studied in non-magnetic materials. Recently, the interest in spin conversion materials has extended to ferromagnetic materials (FMs). FMs can generate magnetization-dependent charge-to-spin conversion (MD-CSC), which is caused by the reduced mirror symmetry due to the presence of magnetization, and this MD-CSC can be used as a writing source for high-density MRAM (Fig. 1) 2. However, the origin of this MD-CSC has not been calrified yet, for instance, whether the interfacial or bulk contribution is domoinant. In addition to this, a guideline for high spin conversion efficiency is highly required for realizing energy-efficient writing in MRAM devices. In this presentation, we systematically studied the charge-to-spin conversion in ferromagnetic material to clarify its origin 3. Through precise measurement of spin conversion efficiency via spin-torque ferromagnetic resonance 4, we experimentally revealed that two different mechanisms, which originate from the bulk and at interface, contribute to the charge-to-spin conversion in ferromagnet. Next, we demonstrated a guideline to enhance the spin conversion efficiency which is to control the interface structure between Ni-Co alloy and non-magnetic spacer Cu spacer layer (Fig.2) 3. Moreover, we show that even the sign of the MD-CSC can be tuned by changing the non-mangetic spacer material 5. These findings would be a milestone toward realizing a high-density and energy-efficient spin-orbit torque MRAMs. This work was partly supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Nos. JP16J03105, JP25220604, JP15H05702, and JP19J01643) and CREST program (No. JPMJCR18T3) of JST. Part of this work was conducted at the AIST Nano-Processing Facility, supported by Nanotechnology Platform Program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technologies (MEXT), Japan.
References
1 A. Manchon et.al, Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 035004 (2019). 2 S. C. Baek et.al, Nat. Mater. 17, 509-513 (2018).
3 Y. Hibino et al., Nat. Commun. 8, 15848 (2021).
4 Y. Hibino et.al, Phys. Rev. B 101, 174441 (2020). 5 Y. Hibino et al., APL Mater. 8, 041110 (2020).