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Register a new userThe nature of domain walls in ultrathin ferromagnets revealed by scanning nanomagnetometry
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The recent observation of current-induced domain wall (DW) motion with large velocity in ultrathin magnetic wires has opened new opportunities for spintronic devices. However, there is still no consensus on the underlying mechanisms of DW motion. Key to this debate is the DW structure, which can be of Bloch or Neel type, and dramatically affects the efficiency of the different proposed mechanisms. To date, most experiments aiming to address this question have relied on deducing the DW structure and chirality from its motion under additional in-plane applied fields, which is indirect and involves strong assumptions on its dynamics. Here we introduce a general method enabling direct, in situ, determination of the DW structure in ultrathin ferromagnets. It relies on local measurements of the stray field distribution above the DW using a scanning nanomagnetometer based on the Nitrogen-Vacancy defect in diamond. We first apply the method to a Ta/Co40Fe40B20(1 nm)/MgO magnetic wire and find clear signature of pure Bloch DWs. In contrast, we observe left-handed Neel DWs in a Pt/Co(0.6 nm)/AlOx wire, providing direct evidence for the presence of a sizable Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) at the Pt/Co interface. This method offers a new path for exploring interfacial DMI in ultrathin ferromagnets and elucidating the physics of DW motion under current.
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We present a quantitative and comparative study of magnetic field driven domain wall depinning transition in different ferromagnetic ultrathin films over a wide range of temperature. We reveal a universal scaling function accounting for both drive and thermal effects on the depinning transition, including critical exponents. The consistent description we obtain for both the depinning and subthreshold thermally activated creep motion should shed light on the universal glassy dynamics of thermally fluctuating elastic objects pinned by disordered energy landscapes.
We show that chiral symmetry breaking enables traveling domain wall solution for the conservative Landau-Lifshitz equation of a uniaxial ferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. In contrast to related domain wall models including stray-field based anisotropy, traveling wave solutions are not found in closed form. For the construction we follow a topological approach and provide details of solutions by means of numerical calculations.
We studied the quantum dynamics of ferromagnetic domain walls (topological kink-type solitons) in one dimensional ferromagnetic spin chains. We show that the tunneling probability does not depend on the number of spins in a domain wall; thus, this probability can be large even for a domain wall containing a large number of spins. We also predict that there is a strong interplay between the tunneling of a wall from one lattice site to another (tunneling of the kink coordinate) and the tunneling of the kink topological charge (so-called chirality). Both of these elementary processes are suppressed for kinks in one-dimensional ferromagnets with half-integer spin. The dispersion law (i.e., the domain wall energy versus momentum) is essentially different for chains with either integer or half-integer spins. The predicted quantum effects could be observed for mesoscopic magnetic structures, e.g., chains of magnetic clusters, large-spin molecules, or nanosize magnetic dots.
Magnetic domain walls can be moved by spin-polarized currents due to spin-transfer torques. This opens the possibility to use them in spintronic memory devices as, e.g., in racetrack storage. Naturally, in miniaturized devices domain walls can get very close to each other and affect each others dynamics. In this work we consider two separated domain walls in different layers which interact via an interlayer exchange coupling. One of these walls is moved by a spin-polarized current. Depending on several parameters as the current density, the interlayer coupling or the pinning potential, the combined dynamics of the two domain walls can change very strongly allowing, e.g., for a correlated motion of the walls. In addition, more subtle effect appear as a suppression of the Walker breakdown accompanied by an increase of the domain wall velocity.
We consider Gaussian fluctuations about domain walls embedded in one- or two-dimensional spin lattices. Analytic expressions for the free energy of one domain wall are obtained. From these, the temperature dependence of experimentally relevant spatial scales -- i.e., the correlation length for spin chains and the size of magnetic domains for thin films magnetized out of plane -- are deduced. Stability of chiral order inside domain walls against thermal fluctuations is also discussed.
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