We report the experimental observation of spin-orbit torque induced switching of perpendicularly magnetized Pt/Co elements in a time resolved stroboscopic experiment based on high resolution Kerr microscopy. Magnetization dynamics is induced by injecting sub-nanosecond current pulses into the bilayer while simultaneously applying static in-plane magnetic bias fields. Highly reproducible homogeneous switching on time scales of several tens of nanoseconds is observed. Our findings can be corroborated using micromagnetic modelling only when including a field-like torque term as well as the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction mediated by finite temperature.
@article{arxiv.1704.06418,
title = {Time resolved measurements of the switching trajectory of Pt/Co elements induced by spin-orbit torques},
author = {Martin M. Decker and Martin S. Wörnle and Matthias Kronseder and Alois Meisinger and M. Vogel and Helmut S. Körner and Guoyi Shi and Cheng Song and Christian H. Back},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.06418},
year = {2017}
}