The influence of orbital moments in anomalous Hall effect in Co/Ni multilayers with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

We focus on the anomalous Hall effects (AHEs) of Co/Ni multilayers with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) by using Ta, Nb, and Cu as the buffer and top layer. An un-conventional AHE behavior was found in which the AH resistance exhibits two anti-symmetric peaks in the presence of a magnetic field. Moreover, Co/Ni multilayers with a Ta neighboring layer show reverse AH resistance compared to the Nb and Cu neighboring layers, except Ta bottom and Cu capping layers. The former can be explained by considering the influence of the external magnetic field on the interfacial spin orbit interaction due to spontaneous symmetry breaking at the ferromagnetic (FM)/FM layer interface. Furthermore, the reverse Co/Ni AHE with a Ta adjacent layer can be interpreted as the leakage spin current of proximity effects from Ta due to its larger spin–orbit coupling, and finally, taking the shunting action of the Cu layer into account, the Co/Ni AHE with Ta and Cu adjacent layers can also be explained. Our results provide a clear physics picture of the AHE in a two-dimensional nano-scaling FM/FM interface with PMA; in particular, this work shows that the non-magnetic adjacent layer with large spin–orbit coupling will play an important role in the understanding of AHE in two-dimensional FM multilayers.