Anisotropic nonvolatile magnetization controlled by electric field in amorphous SmCo thin films grown on (011)-cut PMN-PT substrates

The tunable, nonvolatile electrical modulation of magnetization at room temperature is firstly demonstrated in a magnetically hard amorphous SmCo film grown on a (011)-cut 0.7Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-0.3PbTiO3 (PMN-PT) substrate. Uniaxial in-plane anisotropy with hard and easy axes lying in the [100] and [01-1] directions, respectively, occurs. Bipolar electric field, E, across the thickness direction enhances the remnant magnetization, Mr, along the hard axis, while suppresses the Mr along the easy axis, and the maximal regulation is about -5.8% and +2.2%, respectively. Detailed analysis indicates that the induced effective uniaxial magnetic anisotropy field, which arises from the magnetostrictive properties of the amorphous SmCo thin film and the anisotropic strain from the PMN-PT substrate, is mainly responsible for the anisotropic tunability. The variation of the directional pair ordering of the SmCo film, which is caused by the anisotropic strain due to the electric field, also contributes to the tunability. More importantly, nonvolatile modulation and a stable two-state memory effect are demonstrated for the bipolar case, and in situ X-ray diffraction and X-ray diffraction reciprocal space mapping reveal that these phenomena originate from the electric-field-induced rhombohedral-orthorhombic phase transformation in the PMN-PT substrate. Moreover, by unipolarizing the ferroelectric substrate, a nonvolatile modulation is also observed. The anisotropic nonvolatile control of magnetization in SmCo amorphous films opens a new avenue for developing multifunctional information storage and novel spintronics devices based on hard magnetic materials.