Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, interface-induced damping and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in Pt/Co/W based multilayers

Abstract

[Pt(1.5 nm)/Co(tCo)/W(1.5 nm)]N multilayers of different Co thicknesses (tCo) and number of repeats (N) have been grown by sputtering on Si substrates, and their magnetic properties have been studied. The x-ray reflectivity has been used to measure thicknesses of each layer as well as their roughness. The dependence of the magnetic moment on tCo and N (as determined by vibrating sample magnetometry) indicates the existence of a magnetic dead layer, which increases with N and reaches its maximum values for N ≥ 3. A similar N dependence of the magnetization at saturation is found. Ferromagnetic resonance and Brillouin light scattering have been used to investigate perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, damping, and interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (iDMI) vs Co thickness and the number of Pt/Co/W sequence repeats. We show that these parameters result from interface contributions that vary in a similar way with N, confirming that the first two Pt/Co/W trilayers are of lower quality. We thus conclude that for these systems, the increase of N improves the quality of interfaces and the volume of the stack, leading to the enhancement of the magnetic properties. Moreover, the measured weak iDMI constant, even for the higher N values, suggests that most probably, this iDMI results mainly from the Pt/Co interfaces.