Magnetic skyrmions are localized chiral spin textures, which offer great promise to store and process information at the nanoscale. In the presence of asymmetric exchange interactions, their chirality, which governs their dynamics, is generally considered as an intrinsic parameter set during the sample deposition. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate that a gate voltage can control this key parameter. We probe the chirality of skyrmions and chiral domain walls by observing the direction of their current-induced motion and show that a gate voltage can reverse it. This local and dynamical reversal of the chirality is due to a sign inversion of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction that we attribute to ionic migration of oxygen under gate voltage. Micromagnetic simulations show that the chirality reversal is a continuous transformation, in which the skyrmion is conserved. This control of chirality with 2–3 V gate voltage can be used for skyrmion-based logic devices, yielding new functionalities.
The magneto‐ionic modulation of the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) and the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), in W/CoFeB/HfO2 stacks annealed at different temperatures and for varying annealing times, are presented in this work. A large modulation of PMA and DMI is observed in the systems annealed at 390 and 350 °C, whereas no response to voltage is observed in the as‐grown samples. A strong DMI is only observed in the samples annealed at 390 °C for 1 h, while PMA is present for all annealing times at temperatures of 390 and 350 °C. Magnetic properties including domain wall velocity improve drastically with increasing the annealing temperature and time, while the magneto‐ionic reversibility is increasingly compromised. The changes in PMA and DMI induced by the gate voltages in the samples annealed at 390 °C are permanent, while partial reversibility is only observed for the samples annealed at 350 °C for short times. This dependence of reversibility on post‐grown annealing has been associated to the influence of crystallization on ion mobility. These results show that a compromise between the enhancement of the magnetic properties and the magneto‐ionic performance could be needed in systems requiring annealing to develop PMA and DMI.
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