All-oxide epitaxial heterostructures for the generation and electric field control of topological spin textures

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Electric field-manipulation of topological spin structures is the main driving force for this proposal. In order to achieve this, topological magnetic textures have to be stabilized in materials that are insulating or bad metals, such as some perovskite metal oxides.A uniquely powerful means to tailor physical properties of matter, however, is to design artificial structures such as epitaxial heterostructures, in which structural accommodations and interfacial coupling occur, which, together with the broken inversion symmetry, strongly influence the properties of the heterostructures, often resulting in novel properties. In the particular types of epitaxial heterostructures that we explore here, we aim to make use of: inherent inversion symmetry breaking due to interfacing, magnetic anisotropy (as a combination of magneto-crystalline anisotropy and thin film growth related anisotropy) in a ferromagnetic oxide layer, and the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) at the interface with an oxide with large spin-orbit coupling. Both the magnitude of the interfacial DMI and the magnetic anisotropy are tunable and thus we have to explore which combinations of oxide perovskite layers would be susceptible to form topological spin structures.The control of topological spin textures by electric fields will be studied in backgate electric field effects on Hall resistivity of the heterostructures and in situ biasing experiments in the high resolution transmission electron microscope.