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Néel skyrmions are of high interest due to their potential applications in a variety of spintronic devices, currently accessible in ultrathin heavy metal/ferromagnetic bilayers and multilayers with a strong Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction. Here we report on the direct imaging of chiral spin structures including skyrmions in an exchange-coupled cobalt/palladium multilayer at room temperature with Lorentz transmission electron microscopy, a high-resolution technique previously suggested to exhibit no Néel skyrmion contrast. Phase retrieval methods allow us to map the internal spin structure of the skyrmion core, identifying a 25 nm central region of uniform magnetization followed by a larger region characterized by rotation from in- to out-of-plane. The formation and resolution of the internal spin structure of room temperature skyrmions without a stabilizing out-of-plane field in thick magnetic multilayers opens up a new set of tools and materials to study the physics and device applications associated with chiral ordering and skyrmions.

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Widespread applications of magnetic devices require an efficient means to manipulate the local magnetization. One mechanism is the electrical spin-transfer torque associated with electron-mediated spin currents; however, this suffers from substantial energy dissipation caused by Joule heating. We experimentally demonstrated an alternative approach based on magnon currents and achieved magnon-torque–induced magnetization switching in Bi2Se3/antiferromagnetic insulator NiO/ferromagnet devices at room temperature. The magnon currents carry spin angular momentum efficiently without involving moving electrons through a 25-nanometer-thick NiO layer. The magnon torque is sufficient to control the magnetization, which is comparable with previously observed electrical spin torque ratios. This research, which is relevant to the energy-efficient control of spintronic devices, will invigorate magnon-based memory and logic devices.

spin-transfer torques offer great promise for the development of spin-based devices. The effects of spin-transfer torques are typically analysed in terms of adiabatic and non-adiabatic contributions. Currently, a comprehensive interpretation of the non-adiabatic term remains elusive, with suggestions that it may arise from universal effects related to dissipation processes in spin dynamics, while other studies indicate a strong influence from the symmetry of magnetization gradients. Here we show that enhanced magnetic imaging under dynamic excitation can be used to differentiate between non-adiabatic spin-torque and extraneous influences. We combine Lorentz microscopy with gigahertz excitations to map the orbit of a magnetic vortex core with < 5 nm resolution. Imaging of the gyrotropic motion reveals subtle changes in the ellipticity, amplitude and tilt of the orbit as the vortex is driven through resonance, providing a robust method to determine the non-adiabatic spin torque parameter β = 0.15 ± 0.02 with unprecedented precision, independent of external effects.

We have studied the spin-orbit torques in perpendicularly magnetized Hf/CoFeB/MgO system, by systematically varying the thickness of Hf underlayer. We have observed a sign change of effective fields between Hf thicknesses of 1.75 and 2 nm, indicating that competing mechanisms, such as the Rashba and spin Hall effects, contribute to spin-orbit torques in our system. For larger Hf thicknesses (&gt;2 nm), both the components of spin-orbit torques arise predominantly from the bulk spin Hall effect. We have also confirmed these results using spin-orbit torque induced magnetization switching measurements. Our results could be helpful in designing Hf based SOT devices.

Lorentz imaging shows hidden states and switching behavior of magnetic vortices under rapid optical excitation and quenching.