Micromagnetic Modeling of Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction in Spin Hall Effect Switching

Recent developments in the field of spin orbitronics have demonstrated the feasibility of manipulating the magnetization in a ferromagnet by using electrical currents. Specifically, an in-plane current injected into a heavy-metal/ferromagnet bilayer with perpendicular anisotropy is able to induce reversal of the magnetization. Here we perform micromagnetic simulations to numerically study the dynamics of the magnetization in spin Hall effect-driven switching under the influence of an antisymmetric exchange interaction, namely the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction. We investigate the time evolution of the magnetization during the switching under different circumstances, and study the configuration of the transient magnetic structures which are formed: bubbles, half–skyrmions, and full skyrmions.