Magnetic anisotropic pinning and symmetry breaking in ruthenate superlattices

Abstract

Interfacial engineering enables various emergent effects such as spin reorientations and transport anisotropy. Noncollinear spin textures are essential for realizing many emergent quantum transport phenomena. However, driving such spin structures requires precise control of the interfacial magnetic coupling in complex oxide heterostructures. Here, by utilizing competing exchange interactions at the interface between ferromagnetic metal SrRuO₃ and ferromagnetic insulator LaCoO₃, we investigated a noncollinear spin configuration in SrRuO₃ sublayers. Stripe-like domains were induced by out-of-plane rather than in-plane magnetic fields, indicating strong anisotropy pinning in our superlattices. The observed magneto-transport anisotropy can be well explained by our proposed spin reorientation configurations. No magnetic skyrmionic textures were observed in our superlattice samples. The interfacial exchange interaction may compete with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) that stabilizes skyrmions, featuring a higher exchange coupling energy than that for the topological spin textures according to our micromagnetic simulations. Our work highlights the potential of interfacial engineering in tuning the spintronic properties by designing proper interfacial interactions.

Keywords

Interfacial coupling / magnetic microstructures / magnetic anisotropic pinning / spin reorientation / superlattice

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