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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 87: Focus Session: Unconventional Spin Structures (organized by MA)

TT 87.2: Topical Talk

Thursday, April 3, 2014, 10:00–10:30, BEY 118

Topology and Origin of Effective Spin Meron Pairs in Ferromagnetic Multilayer Elements — •Sebastian Wintz — Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, 01328 Dresden, Germany

Topological spin textures, such as vortices or skyrmions, are attracting significant attention because of their intriguing fundamental properties as well as their promising applicability in memory devices or spin torque oscillators. A particular topological texture that was theoretically predicted is the two-dimensional hedgehog state, also known as a 'Spin Meron'. It had been unclear, however, whether this kind of highly divergent magnetization structure can exist in real continuum systems. Only recently, evidence for the occurrence of meron-like states was reported for trilayer elements consisting of two ferromagnetic layers and a non-ferromagnetic interlayer [1]. On this background we now present a direct proof for the existence of meron-like states in trilayer elements via direct magnetic imaging. We also show that in the presence of biquadratic interlayer exchange coupling, such meron-like pair states may even represent the magnetic ground state of the system. Interestingly, the highly divergent magnetization distribution induces an additional, three-dimensional torus vortex that in-turn causes a symmetry break for the allowed topological pair configurations. [1] C. Phatak et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 067205 (2012). [2] S. Wintz et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 177201 (2013).