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Creators/Authors contains: "Zhang, Xiyue"

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  1. Abstract

    Stratospheric ozone, and its response to anthropogenic forcings, provides an important pathway for the coupling between atmospheric composition and climate. In addition to stratospheric ozone’s radiative impacts, recent studies have shown that changes in the ozone layer due to 4xCO2have a considerable impact on the Northern Hemisphere (NH) tropospheric circulation, inducing an equatorward shift of the North Atlantic jet during boreal winter. Using simulations produced with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) high-top climate model (E2.2), we show that this equatorward shift of the Atlantic jet can induce a more rapid weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The weaker AMOC, in turn, results in an eastward acceleration and poleward shift of the Atlantic and Pacific jets, respectively, on longer time scales. As such, coupled feedbacks from both stratospheric ozone and the AMOC result in a two-time-scale response of the NH midlatitude jet to abrupt 4xCO2forcing: a “fast” response (5–20 years) during which it shifts equatorward and a “total” response (∼100–150 years) during which the jet accelerates and shifts poleward. The latter is driven by a weakening of the AMOC that develops in response to weaker surface zonal winds that result in reduced heat fluxes out of the subpolar gyre and reduced North Atlantic Deep Water formation. Our results suggest that stratospheric ozone changes in the lower stratosphere can have a surprisingly powerful effect on the AMOC, independent of other aspects of climate change.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 15, 2025
  2. Abstract

    Skyrmions and antiskyrmions are nanoscale swirling textures of magnetic moments formed by chiral interactions between atomic spins in magnetic noncentrosymmetric materials and multilayer films with broken inversion symmetry. These quasiparticles are of interest for use as information carriers in next-generation, low-energy spintronic applications. To develop skyrmion-based memory and logic, we must understand skyrmion-defect interactions with two main goals—determining how skyrmions navigate intrinsic material defects and determining how to engineer disorder for optimal device operation. Here, we introduce a tunable means of creating a skyrmion-antiskyrmion system by engineering the disorder landscape in FeGe using ion irradiation. Specifically, we irradiate epitaxial B20-phase FeGe films with 2.8 MeV Au4+ions at varying fluences, inducing amorphous regions within the crystalline matrix. Using low-temperature electrical transport and magnetization measurements, we observe a strong topological Hall effect with a double-peak feature that serves as a signature of skyrmions and antiskyrmions. These results are a step towards the development of information storage devices that use skyrmions and antiskyrmions as storage bits, and our system may serve as a testbed for theoretically predicted phenomena in skyrmion-antiskyrmion crystals.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 3, 2025
  3. We present measurements of thermally generated transverse spin currents in the topological insulator Bi2Se3, thereby completing measurements of interconversions among the full triad of thermal gradients, charge currents, and spin currents. We accomplish this by comparing the spin Nernst magneto-thermopower to the spin Hall magnetoresistance for bilayers of Bi2Se3/CoFeB. We find that Bi2Se3does generate substantial thermally driven spin currents. A lower bound for the ratio of spin current density to thermal gradient isJsxT= (4.9 ± 0.9) × 106(2e)A m2K μm1, and a lower bound for the magnitude of the spin Nernst ratio is −0.61 ± 0.11. The spin Nernst ratio for Bi2Se3is the largest among all materials measured to date, two to three times larger compared to previous measurements for the heavy metals Pt and W. Strong thermally generated spin currents in Bi2Se3can be understood via Mott relations to be due to an overall large spin Hall conductivity and its dependence on electron energy.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 15, 2024
  4. Efficient manipulation of antiferromagnetically coupled materials that are integration-friendly and have strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) is of great interest for low-power, fast, dense magnetic storage and computing. Here, we report a distinct, giant bulk damping-like spin–orbit torque in strong-PMA ferrimagnetic Fe 100− x Tb x single layers that are integration-friendly (composition-uniform, amorphous, and sputter-deposited). For sufficiently thick layers, this bulk torque is constant in the efficiency per unit layer thickness, [Formula: see text]/ t, with a record-high value of 0.036 ± 0.008 nm −1 , and the damping-like torque efficiency [Formula: see text] achieves very large values for thick layers, up to 300% for 90 nm layers. This giant bulk torque by itself switches tens of nm thick Fe 100− x Tb x layers that have very strong PMA and high coercivity at current densities as low as a few MA/cm 2 . Surprisingly, for a given layer thickness, [Formula: see text] shows strong composition dependence and becomes negative for composition where the total angular momentum is oriented parallel to the magnetization rather than antiparallel. Our findings of giant bulk spin torque efficiency and intriguing torque-compensation correlation will stimulate study of such unique spin–orbit phenomena in a variety of ferrimagnetic hosts. This work paves a promising avenue for developing ultralow-power, fast, dense ferrimagnetic storage and computing devices. 
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