Oxygen-Octahedral-Tilting-Driven Topological Hall Effect in Ultrathin SrRuO3 Films

Topological spin textures as an emerging class of topological matter offer a medium for information storage and processing. The recently discovered topological Hall effect (THE) is considered as a fingerprint for electrically probing non-trivial spin-textures. But the origin of THE in oxides has remained elusive. Here we report an observation of the THE in ultrathin (unit cells. u.c.) 4d ferromagnetic SrRuO3 films grown on SrTiO3(001) substrates, which can be attributed to the chiral ordering of spin structure (i.e., skyrmion-like) in the single SrRuO3 layer without contacting 5d oxide SrIrO3 layer. It is revealed that the RuO6 octahedral tilting induced by local orthorhombic-to-tetragonal structural phase transition exists across the SrRuO3/SrTiO3 interface, which naturally breaks the inversion symmetry. Our theoretical calculations demonstrate that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction arises owing to the broken inversion symmetry and strong spin-orbit interaction of 4d SrRuO3. This DM interaction can stabilize the N\'eel-type magnetic skyrmions, which in turn accounts for the observed THE in transport. The RuO6 octahedral tilting-induced DM interaction provides a pathway toward the electrical control of the topological spin textures and resultant THE, which is confirmed both experimentally and theoretically. Besides the fundamental significance, the understanding of THE in oxides and its electrical manipulation presented in this work could advance the low power cost topological electronic and spintronic applications.