Voltage-Controlled Antiferromagnetism in Magnetic Tunnel Junctions

Meng Xu, Mingen Li, Pravin Khanal, Ali Habiboglu, Blake Insana, Yuzan Xiong, Thomas Peterson, Jason C. Myers, Deborah Ortega, Hongwei Qu, C. L. Chien, Wei Zhang, Jian Ping Wang, W. G. Wang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

We demonstrate a voltage-controlled exchange bias effect in CoFeB/MgO/CoFeB magnetic tunnel junctions that is related to the interfacial Fe(Co)Ox formed between the CoFeB electrodes and the MgO barrier. The unique combination of interfacial antiferromagnetism, giant tunneling magnetoresistance, and sharp switching of the perpendicularly magnetized CoFeB allows sensitive detection of the exchange bias. We find that the exchange bias field can be isothermally controlled by magnetic fields at low temperatures. More importantly, the exchange bias can also be effectively manipulated by the electric field applied to the MgO barrier due to the voltage-controlled antiferromagnetic anisotropy in this system.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number187701
JournalPhysical review letters
Volume124
Issue number18
DOIs
StatePublished - May 8 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Shufeng Zhang and Yihong Cheng for inspiring discussion. This work was supported in part by DARPA through the ERI program (FRANC), by NSF through ECCS-1554011, and by Semiconductor Research through the Global Research Collaboration program. W. Z. acknowledges support from AFOSR under Grant No. FA9550-19-1-0254. T. P. acknowledges support from the NSF Scalable Parallelism in the Extreme (SPX) Grant. The TEM study was supported in part by NSF through the UMN MRSEC program.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Physical Society.

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