Magneto‐Ionics in Annealed W/CoFeB/HfO2 Thin Films

The magneto-ionic modulation of the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) and the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), in W/CoFeB/HfO2 stacks annealed at different temperatures and for varying annealing times, are presented in this work. A large modulation of PMA and DMI is observed in the systems annealed at 390 and 350 °C, whereas no response to voltage is observed in the as-grown samples. A strong DMI is only observed in the samples annealed at 390 °C for 1 h, while PMA is present for all annealing times at temperatures of 390 and 350 °C. Magnetic properties including domain wall velocity improve drastically with increasing the annealing temperature and time, while the magneto-ionic reversibility is increasingly compromised. The changes in PMA and DMI induced by the gate voltages in the samples annealed at 390 °C are permanent, while partial reversibility is only observed for the samples annealed at 350 °C for short times. This dependence of reversibility on post-grown annealing has been associated to the influence of crystallization on ion mobility. These results show that a compromise between the enhancement of the magnetic properties and the magneto-ionic performance could be needed in systems requiring annealing to develop PMA and DMI.