Electron transport coupled with magnetism has attracted attention over the years. Among them, recently discovered is topological Hall effect (THE), originating from scalar spin chirality, that is, the solid angle subtended by the spins. THE is found to be a promising tool for probing the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction and consequent magnetic skyrmions. This interaction arises from broken inversion symmetry and hence can be artificially introduced at interface; this concept is lately verified in metal multilayers. However, there are few attempts to investigate such DM interaction at interface through electron transport. We clarified how the transport properties couple with interface DM interaction by fabricating the epitaxial oxide interface. We observed THE in epitaxial bilayers consisting of ferromagnetic SrRuO3 and paramagnetic SrIrO3 over a wide region of both temperature and magnetic field. The magnitude of THE rapidly decreases with the thickness of SrRuO3, suggesting that the interface DM interaction plays a significant role. Such interaction is expected to realize a 10-nm-sized Néel-type magnetic skyrmion. The present results established that the high-quality oxide interface enables us to tune the effective DM interaction; this can be a step toward future topological electronics.
Magnetotransport properties have been investigated for epitaxial thin films of -type MnSi grown on Si(111) substrates. Lorentz transmission electron microscopy images clearly point to the robust formation of Skyrmions over a wide temperature-magnetic field region. New features distinct from those reported previously for MnSi are observed for epitaxial films: a shorter (nearly half) period of the spin helix and Skyrmions, and a topological Hall effect anomaly consisting in times enhancement of the amplitude and in the opposite sign with respect to bulk samples.
Shift current is a steady-state photocurrent generated in non-centrosymmetric single crystals and has been considered to be one of the major origins of the bulk photovoltaic effect. The mechanism of this effect is the transfer of photogenerated charges by the shift of the wave functions, and its amplitude is closely related to the polarization of the electronic origin. Here, we report the photovoltaic effect in an organic molecular crystal tetrathiafulvalene-p-chloranil with a large ferroelectric polarization mostly induced by the intermolecular charge transfer. We observe a fairly large zero-bias photocurrent with visible-light irradiation and switching of the current direction by the reversal of the polarization. Furthermore, we reveal that the travel distance of photocarriers exceeds 200 μm. These results unveil distinct features of the shift current and the potential application of ferroelectric organic molecular compounds for novel optoelectric devices.