Shoya Sakamoto^1*, Masahito Tsujikawa², Masafumi Shirai², Kenta Amemiya³, Shinji Miwa¹

1 The Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo

2 Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University

3 Institute of Materials Structure Science, KEK

* Corresponding authors emails: shoya.sakamoto@issp.u-tokyo.ac.jp

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:a5-5v [version v1]

Publication date: Dec 06, 2021

How to cite this record

Shoya Sakamoto, Masahito Tsujikawa, Masafumi Shirai, Kenta Amemiya, Shinji Miwa, Electron correlation enhances orbital polarization at a ferromagnetic metal/insulator interface, Materials Cloud Archive 2021.210 (2021), https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:a5-5v

Description

The Fe(CoB)/MgO interface is vital to spintronics as it exhibits the tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) effect and interfacial perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) simultaneously. To further enhance TMR and PMA for the development of high-density magnetoresistive random access memory, it is essential to clarify the behavior of Fe atoms interfaced with MgO. This study reveals that the spin and orbital magnetic moments of Fe are enhanced at the Fe/MgO interface. The enhancement in the orbital magnetic moment is much more significant than that predicted by the standard density functional theory. Theoretical calculations based on the orbital polarization correction reproduce this enhancement, the origin of which is attributed to the electron-electron correlation resulting from electron localization at the Fe/MgO interface. The present findings highlight the importance of electro--electron correlation at ferromagnet/oxide interfaces, which has often been disregarded in spintronics, and provide a new perspective in materials design.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
DepthXAS_RightPolarization_summarized.txt MD5md5:e07d138360b48cb38049bb9f45e7fc32	274.1 KiB	Electron-emission-angle dependent XAS spectra (averaged spectra taken with the right-circularly polarized x-ray and positive magnetic fields and with the left-circularly polarized x-ray and negative magnetic fields).
DepthXAS_LeftPolarization_summarized.txt MD5md5:1b282d65f5abf8f3135c0068556e3e08	274.2 KiB	Electron-emission-angle dependent XAS spectra (averaged spectra taken with the left-circularly polarized x-ray and positive magnetic fields and with the right-circularly polarized x-ray and negative magnetic fields).
VFeMgO.cif MD5md5:95e109210a10c9a048955d1a2b55f783	2.6 KiB	Optimized structure file for first-principles calculations
README.txt MD5md5:3cdb4202578ef66cfe66565e578ef978	1.1 KiB	Description of the data.

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External references

Keywords

spintronics magnetic anisotropy Fe/MgO interface Experimental