Scaling of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction with magnetization in Pt/Co(Fe)B/Ir multilayers

Abstract

Magnetic multilayers with perpendicular anisotropy and an interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) contain chiral domain walls and skyrmions that are promising for applications. Here, we measure the temperature dependence of the DMI in Pt/CoFeB/Ir and Pt/CoB/Ir multilayers by means of static domain imaging. First, the temperature dependences of saturation magnetization (MS), exchange stiffness (A), and intrinsic perpendicular anisotropy (Ku) are determined. Then the demagnetized domain pattern in each multilayer is imaged by wide-field Kerr microscopy in the temperature range 9-290 K, and the characteristic domain period at each temperature is determined. We calculate the DMI constant D from an analytical expression for the domain wall energy density that treats the multilayer as a uniform medium. Scaling laws for Ku and D with the magnetization are established from the experiments. While the scaling of Ku is consistent with Callen-Callen theory, we find that the scaling of D is like that of A predicted theoretically (∼1.8).