We have a new paper published in Physical Review Applied: “Meronlike Spin Textures in In-Plane-Magnetized Thin Films”, J. Vijayakumar, Y. Li, D. Bracher, C. W. Barton, M. Horisberger, T. Thomson, J. Miles, C. Moutafis, F. Nolting, and C.A.F. Vaz, Phys. Phys. Rev. Appl. 14 (2020), 054031. You can view the published paper here.

Abstract: The interfacing of magnetic materials with nonmagnetic heavy metals with a large spin-orbit coupling, such as $\mathrm{Pt}$, results in an asymmetric exchange interaction at the interface due to the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), which in turn leads to the formation of skyrmions and topological spin structures in perpendicularly magnetized multilayers. Here, we show that out-of-plane spin domains with lateral dimensions from 200 nm to 2 $\mu m$ are stabilized in in-plane magnetized $\mathrm{Ta}$/$\mathrm{Co}$/$\mathrm{Pt}$ trilayers. We show that these spin textures are largely insensitive to the direction of the in-plane magnetization switched by either magnetic fields or electric fields applied across a ${\mathrm{Si}}_3{N}_4$ gate dielectric. The results of micromagnetic simulations indicate that the DMI is required for the stabilization of such out-of-plane domains and that the presence of surface roughness helps to stabilize larger structures, in agreement with experimental results. We identify these spin structures as meronlike topological textures, characterized by a perpendicular spin texture in an uniformly in-plane magnetized system.