Probing the effects of strain in thin-film Tm3Fe5O12 via resonant inelastic X-ray scattering.

Materials with strong Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction (DMI) are predicted to exhibit nonreciprocal magnon propagation, essential for magnonic diodes and other logic devices [1,2]. Due to their record-low spin current dissipation and large magnon diffusion length, insulating garnet oxides are promising candidates for energy efficient, beyond-CMOS commuting technologies. Interestingly, an interfacial DMI has recently been discovered in technologically relevant thin-film rare-earth garnet oxides and was shown to scale with the spin-orbit coupling of the rare-earth ion, providing a new avenue of chiral magnetism tunability [3,4]. In this talk, I present our resonant inelastic X-ray scattering magnetic circular dichroism (RIXS-MCD) results on the thin-film rare-earth garnet Tm3Fe5O12 (TmIG). Using single-ion model calculations, our results show evidence for a strain induced preferential orientation of the octahedral sites in thin-film TmIG that deviate from the expected orientations of the bulk Ia-3d space group. These results are crucial for understanding the origin of the chiral magnetism and DMI in TmIG and provide valuable insights for engineering DMI interactions in thin-films.

[1] Flaviano José dos Santos et al, Phys. Rev. B 102, 104401 (2020).

[2] Xue Liang, Zhenyu Wang, Peng Yan, and Yan Zhou Phys. Rev. B 106, 224413 (2022).

[3] Avci, C.O., Rosenberg, E., Caretta, L. et al. Nat. Nanotechnol. 14, 561–566 (2019).

[4] Caretta, L., Rosenberg, E., Büttner, F. et al. Nat Commun 11, 1090 (2020).