Engineering perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction in Gd–Fe thin films for spintronics applications

Understanding symmetry breaking has led to various intriguing physical mechanisms and their implications for developing technologically important devices. In magnetic materials, broken inversion symmetry with strong spin–orbit coupling gives rise to Dzyaloshinkii–Moriya interaction (DMI), which favors the formation of topological spin textures and is envisioned as information carriers in spintronic devices. In this study, we prepared Gd–Fe thin films of various thicknesses grown by E-beam deposition. We observed the formation of elongated periodic stripe domains with strong magnetic phase contrasts after demagnetization, signifying the development of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA). Using a well-known analytical domain spacing model, we extracted the DMI value from the stripe domain periodicity combined with magnetometry data. Micromagnetic simulations corroborated the formation of stripe domains based on the analytically estimated DMI values. It is understood that broken inversion symmetry exists between the sublattices of Gd and Fe atoms due to the asymmetric distribution of the elemental content, which gives rise to such a phenomenon. Furthermore, the presence of such PMA and DMI without a heavy metal layer can be an exciting platform for spintronics-based magnetic memory devices.