Direct observation of imprinted antiferromagnetic vortex state in CoO/Fe/Ag(001) disks

In magnetic thin films, a magnetic vortex is a state in which the magnetization vector curls around the center of a confined structure. A vortex state in a thin film disk, for example, is a topological object characterized by the vortex polarity and the winding number. In ferromagnetic (FM) disks, these parameters govern many fundamental properties of the vortex such as its gyroscopic rotation, polarity reversal, core motion, and vortex pair excitation. However, in antiferromagnetic (AFM) disks, though there has been indirect evidence of the vortex state through observations of the induced FM-ordered spins in the AFM disk, they have never been observed directly in experiment. By fabricating single crystalline NiO/Fe/Ag(001) and CoO/Fe/Ag(001) disks and using X-ray Magnetic Linear Dichroism (XMLD), we show direct observation of the vortex state in an AFM disk of AFM/FM bilayer system. We observe that there are two types of AFM vortices, one of which has no analog in FM structures. Finally, we show that a frozen AFM vortex can bias a FM vortex at low temperature