Alloying Controlled Tuning of Interfacial Spin Orbit Interaction and Magnetic Damping in Crystalline FeCo Alloys

Abstract

The discovery of intrinsic spin orbit fields in noncentrosymmetric ferromagnets has attracted considerable interest for both fundamental studies and technological applications. However, once such materials are synthesized, the strength of the spin orbit fields is difficult to tune because it is primarily a bulk property. Here, we demonstrate that the interfacial spin orbit interaction (SOI) in single crystalline FeCo thin films grown on GaAs(001) can be continuously tuned via alloying. Using spin orbit ferromagnetic resonance, we find that the Lande g factor, the Gilbert damping (alpha), and the interfacial spin orbit fields exhibit a common nonmonotonic dependence on Co concentration. A pronounced minimum occurs near x ~ 0.2 where an ultra low damping alpha ~ 0.0015 is achieved. Furthermore, we observe linear scaling between alpha and (g-2)^2, establishing a direct correlation between interfacial SOI and magnetic relaxation. These results identify alloying as an effective knob to engineer interfacial SOI and damping in single crystalline ferromagnet semiconductor heterostructures.