Engineered chiral spin textures and their dynamics in oxide thin films

There has been a great deal of interest in the past several years concerning chiral spin textures in thin ferromagnetic films and their role in both determining the structure of magnetic domain walls and how these structures influence the current and field induced motion of such domain walls. Skyrmions, that have recently been directly observed at room temperature in various metallic materials, have a topological chiral spin texture that strongly influences their response to magnetic field and currents. The properties of the latter structure are manifested in novel and highly interesting transversal transport coefficients. Chiral spin structures are often a result of pseudo-scalar exchange interactions such as the Dzyaloshinskii Moriya interaction (DMI). We propose a project to both design and engineer chiral spin structures and study their dynamics in thin oxide films via interface engineering and explore anomalous transport and magneto-transport properties of such films. The experimental investigations are supported by material specific ab initio calculations. One of the objectives is the ab initio description of the chiral dynamics. Another focus is given to transport and magnetotransport properties. In particular, we concentrate on the microscopic understanding of the transversal transport coefficients in thin noncollinear antiferromagnetic oxide fims.