Anomalous Hall Effect and Magneto-Optic Kerr Effect in Pt/Co/Pt Heterostructure

Abstract

Magnetic multilayer with large perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) has attracted sustained interest owing to its importance to fundamental physics and applications. In this work, the high quality of Pt/Co/Pt heterostructures with large PMA was successfully achieved to exhibit a large anomalous Hall effect (AHE) with squared Hall loops. By calculating the proportional relationship between the longitudinal resistivity (ρxx) and the abnormal Hall coefficient (Rs), it is confirmed that the basic mechanism of AHE comes from the external skew scattering (SS) and side jump (SJ), while SS contribution, related to asymmetric scattering from impurities, is dominant in the AHE. Furthermore, the obvious magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) was also observed using the polar MOKE microscopy. The obviously circular magnetic domain can form and propagate in response to the applied out-of-plane magnetic field, resulting in the magnetization reversal of the entire film. This work offers important information in terms of both AHE and MOKE in the ultrathin ferromagnetic films with perpendicular anisotropy, establishing the application foundation for the nonvolatile memories and spintronics.