Effect of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction on polarized neutrons reflection

Abstract

The antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in noncentrosymmetric systems leads to various nonuniform chiral magnetic textures. Polarized neutron scattering is a powerful method for investigation such chiral distributions. The most used technique is a small-angle neutrons scattering (SANS). Multilayered magnetic films with the interface induced DMI (iDMI) can't be investigated by SANS because of their small volume. The appropriate technique is a polarized neutron reflectometry. Within the framework of the continuum theory of micromagnetics, we explore the impact of the iDMI on the polarized neutrons reflection from multilayers with random magnetic anisotropy. It is shown that the iDMI gives rise to a polarization-dependent asymmetric term in the reflection.