Regensburg 2010 – wissenschaftliches Programm
Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Downloads | Hilfe
O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 7: Spin-Orbit Interaction at Surfaces I
O 7.2: Vortrag
Montag, 22. März 2010, 11:30–11:45, H38
Spin spirals with unique rotational sense in magnetic thin films: Cr on W(110) — •Bernd Zimmermann1, Marcus Heide1,2, Gustav Bihlmayer1, and Stefan Blügel1 — 1Institut für Festkörperforschung (IFF) und Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS), Forschungszentrum Jülich — 2Department of Precision Engineering, Osaka University, Japan
Recently [1] for a Mn monolayer on W(110) a new and unexpected magnetic phase was discovered which exhibits a left rotational sense of the magnetization. The origin was explained by the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction (DMI) caused by the spin orbit coupling in a symmetry-broken environment of the surface. In this work we present investigations on the magnetic structure of a single Cr layer on W(110) by means of density functional theory (DFT). We perform spin-spiral calculations including SOC and find that the DMI is strong enough to compete with the symmetric exchange interaction to create a spiraling magnetic structure with unique rotational sense. A layer-resolved analysis shows, that the main contribution to the DMI comes from the W interface atoms. Using a micromagnetic model, we determine how far the spin spiral deviates from a perfectly homogeneous solution. We compare our results to the systems Mn/W(110) and Fe/W(110), where the direction of the spin spiral and the period length are different. Our results are confirmed by SP-STM experiments [2].
[1] Bode et al., Nature 447, 190 (2007)
[2] Santos et al., New J. of Phys. 10, 013005 (2008)