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Published Online: 07 November 2016
Accepted: October 2016

Pt thickness dependence of spin Hall effect switching of in-plane magnetized CoFeB free layers studied by differential planar Hall effect

Appl. Phys. Lett. 109, 192404 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4967318
G. Mihajlovića), O. Mosendz, L. Wan, N. Smith, Y. Choi, Y. Wang, and J. A. Katineb)
more...View Affiliations
Abstract
We introduce a differential planar Hall effect method that enables the experimental study of spin orbit torque switching of in-plane magnetized free layers in a simple Hall bar device geometry. Using this method, we study the Pt thickness dependence of switching currents and show that they decrease monotonically down to the minimum experimental thickness of ∼5 nm, while the critical current and power densities are very weakly thickness dependent, exhibiting the minimum values of Jc0 = 1.1 × 108 A/cm2 and ρJc02=0.6×1012 W/cm3 at this minimum thickness. Our results suggest that a significant reduction of the critical parameters could be achieved by optimizing the free layer magnetics, which makes this technology a viable candidate for fast, high endurance and low-error rate applications such as cache memories.

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