Long-range chiral exchange interaction in synthetic antiferromagnets

Mining for ideas

“…Instead, they arranged themselves at a right angle to those of the other layer. 6 The researchers could confirm that this previously unknown interaction exists in several different systems of stacked 2D layers and can be engineered through changes in the layering. Thus, they hope that it may become useful in applications such as high-density data storage.…”

Bridging the gap

“…This intralayer chiral exchange interaction has boosted the field of chiral magnetism, as it opened new pathways for developing devices based on chiral configurations like magnetic skyrmions 5 . Now, Dong-Soo Han et al 6 and Amalio Fernández-Pacheco et al 7 report in Nature Materials their independent observations of a different kind of antisymmetric exchange interaction. They studied the magnetization reversal in multilayer stacks containing two magnetic layers separated by non-magnetic layers and revealed an asymmetry in the switching fields with respect to the direction of the external applied field.…”

Magnetic Skyrmions in a Hall Balance with Interfacial Canted Magnetizations

“…[ 31,32 ] Unfortunately, completely compensated magnetizations in ideal antiferromagnets result in challenges related to the detection and manipulation of antiferromagnetic skyrmions. [ 33–35 ] Fortunately, chiral behavior including interlayer Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions (DMI) and stabilized skyrmions has been demonstrated in synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs), [ 36–39 ] where the alignment of the magnetic moments can be tuned by manipulating two ferromagnetic layers coupled antiferromagnetically. [ 40,41 ] However, the microscopic origin of skyrmion generation is complicated, where opposite skyrmions in SAFs with two ferromagnetic layers have been theoretically proposed.…”