No Arabic abstract
A two-parameter analytical model of the magnetic vortex in a thin disk of soft magnetic material is constructed. The model is capable of describing the change in evolution of net vortex state magnetization and of core position when the vortex core interacts with a magnetic pinning site. The model employs a piecewise, physically continuous, magnetization distribution obtained by the merger of two extensively used one-parameter analytical models of the vortex state in a disk. Through comparison to numerical simulations of ideal disks with and without pinning sites, the model is found to accurately predict the magnetization, vortex position, hysteretic transitions, and 2-D displacement of the vortex in the presence of pinning sites. The model will be applicable to the quantitative determination of vortex pinning energies from measurements of magnetization.
Vortex pairs in magnetic nanopillars with strongly coupled cores and pinning of one of the cores by a morphological defect, are used to perform resonant pinning spectroscopy, in which a microwave excitation applied to the nanopillar produces pinning or depinning of the cores only when the excitation is in resonance with the rotational or gyrational eigenmodes of the specific initial state of the core-core pair. The shift in the eigenmode frequencies between the pinned and depinned states is determined experimentally and explained theoretically, and illustrates the potential for multi-core spin-vortex memory with resonant writing of information on to various stable vortex pair states. Further, it is shown how the same resonant spectroscopy techniques applied to a vortex pair can be used as a sensitive nanoscale probe for characterizing morphological defects in magnetic films.
We have studied Josephson tunneling through a circularly polarized micron or submicron-size disk of a soft ferromagnetic material. Such a disk contains a vortex that exhibits rich classical dynamics and has recently been proposed as a tool to study quantum dynamics of the nanoscale vortex core. The change in the Josephson current that is related to a tiny displacement of the vortex core has been computed analytically and plotted numerically for permalloy disks used in experiments. It is shown that a Josephson junction with a magnetic disk in the vortex state can be an interesting physical system that may be used to measure the nanoscale motion of the magnetic vortex.
We use Monte Carlo simulation to study the vortex nucleation on magnetic nanodots at low temperature. In our simulations, we have considered a simple microscopic two-dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg model with term to describe the anisotropy due to the presence of the nanodot edge. We have considered the thickness of the edge, which was not considered in previous works, introducing a term that controls the energy associated to the edge. Our results clearly show that the thickness of the edge has a considerable influence in the vortex nucleation on magnetic nanodots. We have obtained the hysteresis curve for several values of the surface anisotropy and skin depth parameter ($xi$). The results are in excellent agreement with experimental data.
Magnetic nanostructures are often considered as highly functional materials because they exhibit unusual magnetic properties under different external conditions. We study the effect of surface pinning on the core-shell magnetic nanostuctures of different shapes and sizes considering the spin-interaction to be Ising-like. We explore the hysteresis properties and find that the exchange bias, even under zero field cooled conditions, increases with increase of, the pinning density and the fraction of up-spins among the pinned ones. We explain these behavior analytically by introducing a simple model of the surface. The asymmetry in hysteresis is found to be more prominent in a inverse core-shell structure, where spin interaction in the core is antiferromagnetic and that in the shell is ferromagnetic. These studied of inverse core-shell structure are extended to different shapes, sizes, and different spin interactions, namely Ising, XY- and Heisenberg models in three dimension. We also briefly discuss the pinning effects on magnetic heterostructures.
Thin-film ferromagnetic disks present a vortex spin structure whose dynamics, added to the small size (~10 nm) of their core, earned them intensive study. Here we use a scanning nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center microscope to quantitatively map the stray magnetic field above a 1 micron-diameter disk of permalloy, unambiguously revealing the vortex core. Analysis of both probe-to-sample distance and tip motion effects through stroboscopic measurements, allows us to compare directly our quantitative images to micromagnetic simulations of an ideal structure. Slight perturbations with respect to the perfect vortex structure are clearly detected either due to an applied in-plane magnetic field or imperfections of the magnetic structures. This work demonstrates the potential of scanning NV microscopy to map tiny stray field variations from nanostructures, providing a nanoscale, non-perturbative detection of their magnetic texture.