No Arabic abstract
Recent studies have predicted extraordinary properties for transverse domain walls in cylindrical nanowires: zero depinning current, the absence of the Walker breakdown, and applications as domain wall oscillators. In order to reliably control the domain wall motion, it is important to understand how they interact with energy barriers. In this paper, we study the motion and depinning of transverse domain walls through potential barriers in ferromagnetic cylindrical nanowires. We use magnetic fields and spin-polarized currents to drive the domain walls along the wire. Using magnetic fields, we find that the minimum and the maximum fields required to push the domain wall through the barrier differ by 30 %. On the contrary, using spin-polarized currents, we find variations of a factor 130 between the minimum value of the depinning current density and the maximum value. We study the depinning current density as a function of the height of the energy barrier using numerical and analytical methods. We find that, for a barrier of 40 k_B T, a depinning current density of about 5 uA is sufficient to depin the domain wall. We reveal and explain the mechanism that leads to these unusually low depinning currents. One requirement for this new depinning mechanism is for the domain wall to be able to rotate around its own axis. With the right barrier design, the spin torque transfer term is acting exactly against the damping in the micromagnetic system, and thus the low current density is sufficient to accumulate enough energy quickly. These key insights may be crucial in furthering the development of novel memory technologies, such as the racetrack memory, that can be controlled through low current densities.
We report several procedures for the robust nucleation of magnetic domain walls in cylindrical permalloy nanowires. Specific features of the magnetic force microscopy contrast of such soft wires are discussed, with a view to avoid the misinterpretation of the magnetization states. The domain walls could be moved under quasistatic magnetic fields in the range 0.1--10 mT.
The motion of magnetic domain walls in ultrathin magnetic heterostructures driven by current via the spin Hall torque is described. We show results from perpendicularly magnetized CoFeB|MgO heterostructures with various heavy metal underlayers. The domain wall moves along or against the current flow depending on the underlayer material. The direction to which the domain wall moves is associated with the chirality of the domain wall spiral formed in these heterostructures. The one-dimensional model is used to describe the experimental results and extract parameters such as the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya exchange constant which is responsible for the formation of the domain wall spiral. Fascinating effects arising from the control of interfaces in magnetic heterostructures are described.
Antiferromagnetic materials are outstanding candidates for next generation spintronic applications, because their ultrafast spin dynamics makes it possible to realize several orders of magnitude higher-speed devices than conventional ferromagnetic materials1. Though spin-transfer torque (STT) is a key for electrical control of spins as successfully demonstrated in ferromagnetic spintronics, experimental understanding of STT in antiferromagnets has been still lacking despite a number of pertinent theoretical studies2-5. Here, we report experimental results on the effects of STT on domain-wall (DW) motion in antiferromagnetically-coupled ferrimagnets. We find that non-adiabatic STT acts like a staggered magnetic field and thus can drive DWs effectively. Moreover, the non-adiabaticity parameter {beta} of STT is found to be significantly larger than the Gilbert damping parameter {alpha}, challenging our conventional understanding of the non-adiabatic STT based on ferromagnets as well as leading to fast current-induced antiferromagnetic DW motion. Our study will lead to further vigorous exploration of STT for antiferromagnetic spin textures for fundamental physics on spin-charge interaction as wells for efficient electrical control of antiferromagnetic devices.
The interaction between a spin polarized dc electrical current and spin wave modes of a cylindrical nanowire is investigated in this report. We found that close to the critical current, the uniform mode is suppressed, while the edge mode starts to propagate into the sample. When the current exceeds the critical value, this phenomenon is even more accentuated. The edge mode becomes the uniform mode of the nanowire. The higher spin wave modes are slowly pushed away by the current until the propagating mode remains.
Use of a spin polarized current for the manipulation of magnetic domain walls in ferromagnetic nanowires has been the subject of intensive research for many years. Recently, due to technological advancements, creating nano-contacts with special characteristics is becoming more and more prevalent. We now present a full quantum investigation of the magnetoresistance and the spin transfer torque in a domain wall, which is embedded in a nano-contact of Ni$_{80}$Fe$_ {20}$, where the size of the domain wall becomes a relevant tunable parameter. The dependence on the domain wall width as well as the spatial dependence of the torque along the domain wall can be analyzed in complete detail. The magnetoresistance drops with increasing domain wall width as expected, but also shows characteristic modulations and points of resonant spin-flip transmission. The spin transfer torque has both significant in-plane and out-of-plane contributions even without considering relaxation. A closer inspection identifies contributions from the misalignment of the spin density for short domain walls as well as an effective gauge field for longer domain walls, both of which oscillate along the domain wall.