Anatomy and Giant Enhancement of the Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy of Cobalt-Graphene Heterostructures

作者：Yang Hongxin; Anh Duc Vu; Hallal Ali; Rougemaille Nicolas; Coraux Johann; Chen Gong; Schmid Andreas K; Chshiev Mairbek^*

来源：Nano Letters, 2016, 16(1): 145-151.

DOI：10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b03392

• Magnetocrystalline anisotropy
• graphene
• spintronics
• graphene/transition metal interfaces

We report strongly enhanced perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) of Co films by graphene coating from both first-principles and experiments. Our calculations show that graphene can dramatically boost the surface anisotropy of Co films up to twice the value of its pristine counterpart and can extend the out-of-plane effective anisotropy up to unprecedented thickness of 25 angstrom. These findings are supported by our experiments on graphene coating on Co films grown on Ir substrate. Furthermore, we report layer-resolved and orbital-hybridization-resolved anisotropy analysis, which help understanding of the physical mechanisms of PMA and more practically can help design structures with giant PMA. As an example, we propose superexchange stabilized Co-graphene heterostructures with a robust constant effective PMA. and linearly increasing interfacial anisotropy as a function of film thickness. These findings point toward possibilities to engineer graphene/ferromagnetic metal heterostructures with giant magnetic anisotropy more than 20-times larger compared to conventional multilayers, which constitutes a hallmark for future graphene and traditional spintronic technologies.

• 出版日期2016-1
• 单位中国地震局