Solar manipulations of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy for flexible spintronics

Abstract

Flexible electronics/spintronics attracts researchers’ attention for their application potential abroad in wearable devices, healthcare, and other areas. Those devices’ performance (speed, energy consumption) is highly dependent on manipulating information bits (spin-orientation in flexible spintronics). In this work, we established an organic photovoltaic (OPV)/ZnO/Pt/Co/Pt heterostructure on flexible PET substrates with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA). Under sunlight illumination, the photoelectrons generated from the OPV layer transfer into the PMA heterostructure, then they reduce the PMA strength by enhancing the interfacial Rashba field accordingly. The coercive field (H_c) reduces from 800 Oe to 500 Oe at its maximum, and the magnetization can be switched up and down reversibly. The stability of sunlight control of magnetization reversal under various bending conditions is also tested for flexible spintronic applications. Lastly, the voltage output of sunlight-driven PMA is achieved in our prototype device, exhibiting an excellent angular dependence and opening a door towards solar-driven flexible spintronics with much lower energy consumption.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

interfacial magnetoelectric coupling / perpendicular magnetic anisotropy / deterministic magnetization reversal / photovoltaic control of magnetism

References

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Declarations

The authors declare that they have no competing interests and there are no conflicts.

Electronic supplementary materials

The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-023-1377-0 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-023-1377-0.

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFB3203903), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52172126 and 62001366), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2022M722509).

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