A room temperature polar magnetic metal
Hongrui Zhang, Yu‐Tsun Shao, Rui Chen, Xiang Chen, Sandhya Susarla, David Raftrey, Jonathan Reichanadter, Lucas Caretta, Xiaoxi Huang, Nicholas S. Settineri, Zhen Chen, Jingcheng Zhou, Edith Bourret, Peter Ercius, Jie Yao, Peter Fischer, Jeffrey B. Neaton, David A. Muller, R. J. Birgeneau, R. Ramesh
Abstract
The emergence of long-range magnetic order in noncentrosymmetric compounds has stimulated interest in the possibility of exotic spin transport phenomena and topologically protected spin textures for applications in next-generation spintronics. Polar magnets, with broken symmetries of spatial inversion and time reversal, usually host chiral spin textures. This work reports on a wurtzite-structure polar magnetic metal, identified as AA′-stacked (Fe0.5Co0.5)5GeTe2, which exhibits a Néel-type skyrmion lattice as well as a Rashba-Edelstein effect at room temperature. Atomic resolution imaging of the structure reveals a structural transition as a function of Co-substitution, leading to the emergence of the polar phase at 50% Co. This discovery reveals an unprecedented layered polar magnetic system for investigating intriguing spin topologies, and it ushers in a promising new framework for spintronics.