No Arabic abstract
We explore the magnetic-field-driven motion of domain walls with different chiralities in thin ferromagnetic films made of Pt/Co/Pt, Au/Co/Pt, and Pt/Co/Au. From the analysis of domain wall dynamics, we extract parameters characterizing the interaction between domain walls and weak pinning disorder of the films. The variations of domain wall structure, controlled by an in-plane field, are found to modify the characteristic length-scale of pinning in strong correlation with the domain wall width, whatever its chirality and the interaction strength between domain walls and pinning defects. These findings should be also relevant for a wide variety of elastic interfaces moving in weak pinning disordered media.
We report a comparative study of magnetic field driven domain wall motion in thin films made of different magnetic materials for a wide range of field and temperature. The full thermally activated creep motion, observed below the depinning threshold, is shown to be described by a unique universal energy barrier function. Our findings should be relevant for other systems whose dynamics can be modeled by elastic interfaces moving on disordered energy landscapes.
We present a quantitative investigation of magnetic domain wall pinning in thin magnets with perpendicular anisotropy. A self-consistent description exploiting the universal features of the depinning and thermally activated sub-threshold creep regimes observed in the field driven domain wall velocity, is used to determine the effective pinning parameters controlling the domain wall dynamics: the effective height of pinning barriers, the depinning threshold, and the velocity at depinning. Within this framework, the analysis of results published in the literature allows for a quantitative comparison of pinning properties for a set of magnetic materials in a wide temperature range. On the basis of scaling arguments, the microscopic parameters controlling the pinning: the correlation length of pinning, the collectively pinned domain wall length (Larkin length) and the strength of pinning disorder, are estimated from the effective pinning and the micromagnetic parameters. The analysis of thermal effects reveals a crossover between different pinning length scales and strengths at low reduced temperature.
Thin films of topological insulators (TI) attract large attention because of expected topological effects from the inter-surface hybridization of Dirac points. However, these effects may be depleted by unexpectedly large energy smearing $Gamma$ of surface Dirac points by the random potential of abundant Coulomb impurities. We show that in a typical TI film with large dielectric constant $sim 50$ sandwiched between two low dielectric constant layers, the Rytova-Chaplik-Entin-Keldysh modification of the Coulomb potential of a charge impurity allows a larger number of the film impurities to contribute to $Gamma$. As a result, $Gamma$ is large and independent of the TI film thickness $d$ for $d > 5$ nm. In thinner films $Gamma$ grows with decreasing $d$ due to reduction of screening by the hybridization gap. We study the surface conductivity away from the neutrality point and at the neutrality point. In the latter case, we find the maximum TI film thickness at which the hybridization gap is still able to make a TI film insulating and allow observation of the quantum spin Hall effect, $d_{max} sim 7$ nm.
We investigate the roughening of shear cracks running along the interface between a thin film and a rigid substrate. We demonstrate that short-range correlated fluctuations of the interface strength lead to self-affine roughening of the crack front as the driving force (the applied shear stress/stress intensity factor) increases towards a critical value. We investigate the disorder-induced perturbations of the crack displacement field and crack energy, and use the results to determine the crack pinning force and to assess the shape of the critical crack. The analytical arguments are validated by comparison with simulations of interface cracking.
To stabilize the non-trivial spin textures, e.g., skyrmions or chiral domain walls in ultrathin magnetic films, an additional degree of freedom such as the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (IDMI) must be induced by the strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) of a stacked heavy metal layer. However, advanced approaches to simultaneously control IDMI and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) are needed for future spin-orbitronic device implementations. Here, we show an effect of atomic-scale surface modulation on the magnetic properties and IDMI in ultrathin films composed of 5d heavy metal/ferromagnet/4d(5d) heavy metal or oxide interfaces, such as Pt/CoFeSiB/Ru, Pt/CoFeSiB/Ta, and Pt/CoFeSiB/MgO. The maximum IDMI value corresponds to the correlated roughness of the bottom and top interfaces of the ferromagnetic layer. The proposed approach for significant enhancement of PMA and IDMI through the interface roughness engineering at the atomic scale offers a powerful tool for the development of the spin-orbitronic devices with the precise and reliable controllability of their functionality.