Orbital torque in magnetic bilayers

Dongjoon Lee, Dongwook Go, Hyeon-Jong Park, Wonmin Jeong, Hye-Won Ko, Deokhyun Yun, Daegeun Jo, Soogil Lee, Gyungchoon Go, Jung Hyun Oh, Kab-Jin Kim, Byong-Guk Park, Byoung-Chul Min, Hyun Cheol Koo, Hyun-Woo Lee (), OukJae Lee () and Kyung-Jin Lee ()
Additional contact information
Dongjoon Lee: KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University
Dongwook Go: Peter Grünberg Institut and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich and JARA
Hyeon-Jong Park: KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University
Wonmin Jeong: Center for Spintronics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology
Hye-Won Ko: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Deokhyun Yun: Center for Spintronics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology
Daegeun Jo: Pohang University of Science and Technology
Soogil Lee: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Gyungchoon Go: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Jung Hyun Oh: Korea University
Kab-Jin Kim: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Byong-Guk Park: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Byoung-Chul Min: Center for Spintronics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology
Hyun Cheol Koo: KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University
Hyun-Woo Lee: Pohang University of Science and Technology
OukJae Lee: Center for Spintronics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology
Kyung-Jin Lee: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract The orbital Hall effect describes the generation of the orbital current flowing in a perpendicular direction to an external electric field, analogous to the spin Hall effect. As the orbital current carries the angular momentum as the spin current does, injection of the orbital current into a ferromagnet can result in torque on the magnetization, which provides a way to detect the orbital Hall effect. With this motivation, we examine the current-induced spin-orbit torques in various ferromagnet/heavy metal bilayers by theory and experiment. Analysis of the magnetic torque reveals the presence of the contribution from the orbital Hall effect in the heavy metal, which competes with the contribution from the spin Hall effect. In particular, we find that the net torque in Ni/Ta bilayers is opposite in sign to the spin Hall theory prediction but instead consistent with the orbital Hall theory, which unambiguously confirms the orbital torque generated by the orbital Hall effect. Our finding opens a possibility of utilizing the orbital current for spintronic device applications, and it will invigorate researches on spin-orbit-coupled phenomena based on orbital engineering.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26650-9

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