Epitaxial Exchange-Bias Systems: From Fundamentals to Future Spin Orbitronics

Exchange bias has been investigated for more than half a century and several insightful reviews, published around the year 2000, have already summarized many key experimental and theoretical aspects related to this phenomenon. Since then, due to developments in thin-film fabrication and sophisticated characterization methods, exchange bias continues to show substantial advances; in particular, recent studies on epitaxial systems, which is the focus of this review, allow many long-standing mysteries of exchange bias to be unambiguously resolved. The advantage of epitaxial samples lies in the well-defined interface structures, larger coherence lengths, and competing magnetic anisotropies, which are often negligible in polycrystalline samples. Beginning with a discussion of the microscopic spin properties at the ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic interface, we correlate the details of spin lattices with phenomenological anisotropies, and finally connect the two by introducing realistic measurement approaches and models. We conclude by providing a brief perspective on the future of exchange bias and related studies in the context of the rapidly evolving interest in antiferromagnetic spintronics.