The topological Hall effect (THE) has been discovered in ultrathin SrRuO3 (SRO) films, where the interface between the SRO layer and another oxide layer breaks the inversion symmetry resulting in the appearance of THE. Thus, THE only occurs in ultra-thin SRO films of several unit cells. In addition to employing a heterostructure, the inversion symmetry can be broken intrinsically in bulk SRO by introducing defects. In this study THE is observed in 60 nm thick SRO films, in which defects and lattice distortions are introduced by helium ion irradiation. The irradiated SRO films exhibit a pronounced THE in a wide temperature range from 5 K to 80 K. These observations can be attributed to the emergence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction as a result of artificial inversion symmetry breaking associated to the lattice defect engineering. The creation and control of the THE in oxide single layers can be realized by ex situ film processing. Therefore, this work provides new insights into the THE and illustrates a promising strategy to design novel spintronics devices.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2004.11301,
title = {Topological Hall effect in single thick SrRuO3 layers induced by defect engineering},
author = {Changan Wang and Ching-Hao Chang and Andreas Herklotz and Chao Chen and Fabian Ganss and Ulrich Kentsch and Deyang Chen and Xingsen Gao and Yu-Jia Zeng and Olav Hellwig and Manfred Helm and Sibylle Gemming and Ying-Hao Chu and Shengqiang Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.11301},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
18 pages, including the suppl. material, to be published at Advanced Electronic Materials