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Model Of Orbital Populations For Voltage-Controlled Magnetic Anisotropy In Transition-Metal Thin Films, Jia Zhang, Pavel V. Lukashev, Sitaram Jaswal, Evgeny Y. Tsymbal

Evgeny Tsymbal Publications

Voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) is an efficient way to manipulate the magnetization states in nanomagnets and is promising for low-power spintronic applications. The underlying physical mechanism for VCMA is known to involve a change in the d orbital occupation on the transition-metal interface atoms with an applied electric field. However, a simple qualitative picture of how this occupation controls the magnetocrystalline anisotropy (MCA) and even why in certain cases the MCA has the opposite sign remains elusive. In this paper, we exploit a simple model of orbital populations to elucidate a number of features typical for the interface MCA, and …