Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Downloads | Help
O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 32: Surface or interface magnetism
O 32.2: Talk
Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 10:45–11:00, SCH A315
Electric field control of the magnetic anisotropy of ultra-thin Fe films — •Daniel Wortmann, Gustav Bihlmayer, and Stefan Blügel — Institut für Festkörperforschung and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich, 52425 Jülich, Germany
With the advancement of spintronics, magnetoelectric coupling phenomena move into the focus of research. They offer the possibility to manipulate the magnetic state by means of an electric field. In particular, such effects are useful in magnetic multilayers in which an applied bias voltage and its resulting field might assist in switching magnetic layers. While different magnetoelectric effects can be considered we will focus here on a change of the magnetic anisotropy due to an applied electric field.
We present DFT-type ab initio calculations performed with the FLEUR code (www.flapw.de) utilizing the full-potential linearized augmented planewave method (FLAPW). The magnetic systems we studied are 1-2 monolayers of Fe on a Au(100) substrate. To simulate a tunneljunction setup we compared the effect of an electric field acting on a surface, i.e. a Fe/vacuum interface to a MgO covered system, i.e. a Fe/MgO interface. We observe a significant enhancement of the field-dependence by covering the Fe film with the insulator.