Advanced Materials: Ionic Liquid Gating Control of Spin Reorientation Transition

and Switching of Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy

Electric field (E-field) controlled perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) switching is of great potential to realize magnetoelectric (ME) memories and other ME devices with an efficient energy costing. The key step to realize this goal is to modulate spin-reorientation transition (SRT) electrically, allowing voltage-induced magnetization switches between the in-plane and out-of-plane directions.

On May 29th, 2018, Advanced Materials published an article from The School of the Electronic and Information Engineering and The School of Material Science and Engineering in Xi’an Jiaotong University. The results show that SRT appear with a small bias induced by Ionic liquid (IL) gating which is quite amazing for future applications. And with first principle calculations, the key mechanism of the SRT is proved to be the IL gating controlled interfacial spin–orbital coupling as well as the net Rashba magnetic field between the Co and Pt layers, resulting in a competition of the ordinary perpendicular PMA field and the induced in plane Rashba magnetic field.

This paper contains both experimental and theoretical works. The experiments are performed by Shishun Zhao in Prof. Ming Liu’s group with the help of Prof. Ziyao Zhou in The School of the Electronic and Information Engineering and theoretical part is carried out by Lei Wang in Prof. Tai Min’s group in The School of Material Science and Engineering.

Ziyao Zhou and Ming Liu are the corresponding authors and Xi’an Jiaotong University is the first affiliation.

原文链接：https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201801639