Correlation between interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and interfacial magnetic anisotropy of Pt/Co/MgO structures

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the correlation between interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (iDMI) and interfacial perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (iPMA) of Pt/Co/MgO stacks with varying annealing temperature. We observe that iDMI of whole stack decreases as iPMA of whole stack increases, unexpectedly. However, when we separate contributions from the Pt/Co and Co/MgO interfaces, we find that at the Pt/Co interface, the iDMI increases with increasing iPMA, whereas at the Co/MgO interface, no meaningful correlation between the two interfacial energies is observed. Therefore, the correlation between iDMI and iPMA of whole stack is a consequence of different correlations at different interfaces. © 2019 The Japan Society of Applied Physics