Direct measurement of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in X

Abstract

The Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) has recently attracted considerable interest owing to its fundamental role in the stabilization of chiral spin textures in ultrathin ferromagnets, which are interesting candidates for future spintronic technologies. Here we employ a scanning nanomagnetometer based on a single nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond to locally probe the strength of the interfacial DMI in CoFeB|MgO ultrathin films grown on different heavy metal underlayers X=Ta, TaN, and W. By measuring the stray field emanating from domain walls in micron-long wires of such materials, we observe deviations from the Bloch profile for TaN and W underlayers that are consistent with a positi..