The possibility of utilizing the rich spin-dependent properties of graphene has attracted great attention in pursuit of spintronics advances. The promise of high-speed and low-energy consumption devices motivates a search for layered structures that stabilize chiral spin textures such as topologically protected skyrmions. Here we demonstrate that chiral spin textures are induced at graphene/ferromagnetic metal interfaces. This is unexpected because graphene is a weak spin-orbit coupling material and is generally not expected to induce sufficient Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction to affect magnetic chirality. We demonstrate that graphene induces a new type of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction due to a Rashba effect. First-principles calculations and experiments using spin-polarized electron microscopy show that this graphene-induced Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can have similar magnitude as at interfaces with heavy metals. This work paves a new path towards two-dimensional material based spin orbitronics.
@article{arxiv.1704.09023,
title = {Significant Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction at Graphene-Ferromagnet Interfaces due to Rashba-effect},
author = {Hongxin Yang and Gong Chen and Alexandre A. C. Cotta and Alpha T. N'Diaye and Sergey A. Nikolaev and Edmar A. Soares and Waldemar A. A. Macedo and Andreas K. Schmid and Albert Fert and Mairbek Chshiev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.09023},
year = {2018}
}