No Arabic abstract
Antiferromagnets offer remarkable promise for future spintronics devices, where antiferromagnetic order is exploited to encode information. The control and understanding of antiferromagnetic domain walls (DWs) - the interfaces between domains with differing order parameter orientations - is a key ingredient for advancing such antiferromagnetic spintronics technologies. However, studies of the intrinsic mechanics of individual antiferromagnetic DWs remain elusive since they require sufficiently pure materials and suitable experimental approaches to address DWs on the nanoscale. Here we nucleate isolated, 180{deg} DWs in a single-crystal of Cr$_2$O$_3$, a prototypical collinear magnetoelectric antiferromagnet, and study their interaction with topographic features fabricated on the sample. We demonstrate DW manipulation through the resulting, engineered energy landscape and show that the observed interaction is governed by the DWs elastic properties. Our results advance the understanding of DW mechanics in antiferromagnets and suggest a novel, topographically defined memory architecture based on antiferromagnetic DWs.
Recent experimental studies of magnetic domain expansion under easy-axis drive fields in materials with a perpendicular magnetic anisotropy have shown that the domain wall velocity is asymmetric as a function of an external in plane magnetic field. This is understood as a consequence of the inversion asymmetry of the system, yielding a finite chiral Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. Numerous attempts have been made to explain these observations using creep theory, but, in doing so, these have not included all contributions to the domain wall energy or have introduced additional free parameters. In this article we present a theory for creep motion of chiral domain walls in the creep regime that includes the most important contributions to the domain-wall energy and does not introduce new free parameters beyond the usual parameters that are included in the micromagnetic energy. Furthermore, we present experimental measurements of domain wall velocities as a function of in-plane field that are well decribed by our model, and from which material properties such as the strength of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and the demagnetization field are extracted.
We consider a domain wall in the mesoscopic quasi-one-dimensional sample (wire or stripe) of weakly anisotropic two-sublattice antiferromagnet, and estimate the probability of tunneling between two domain wall states with different chirality. Topological effects forbid tunneling for the systems with half-integer spin S of magnetic atoms which consist of odd number of chains N. External magnetic field yields an additional contribution to the Berry phase, resulting in the appearance of two different tunnel splittings in any experimental setup involving a mixture of odd and even N, and in oscillating field dependence of the tunneling rate with the period proportional to 1/N.
The time it takes to accelerate an object from zero to a given velocity depends on the applied force and the environment. If the force ceases, it takes exactly the same time to completely decelerate. A magnetic domain wall (DW) is a topological object that has been observed to follow this behavior. Here we show that acceleration and deceleration times of chiral Neel walls driven by current are different in a system with low damping and moderate Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) exchange constant. The time needed to accelerate a DW with current via the spin Hall torque is much faster than the time it needs to decelerate once the current is turned off. The deceleration time is defined by the DM exchange constant whereas the acceleration time depends on the spin Hall torque, enabling tunable inertia of chiral DWs. Such unique feature of chiral DWs can be utilized to move and position DWs with lower current, key to the development of storage class memory devices.
We experimentally study the structure and dynamics of magnetic domains in synthetic antiferromagnets based on Co/Ru/Co films. Dramatic effects arise from the interaction among the topological defects comprising the dual domain walls in these structures. Under applied magnetic fields, the dual domain walls propagate following the dynamics of bi-meronic (bi-vortex/bi-antivortex) topological defects built in the walls. Application of an external field triggers a rich dynamical response: The propagation depends on mutual orientation and chirality of bi-vortices and bi-antivortices in the domain walls. For certain configurations, we observe sudden jumps of composite domain walls in increasing field, which are associated with the decay of composite skyrmions. These features allow for enhanced control of domain-wall motion in synthetic antiferromagnets with the potential of employing them as information carriers in future logic and storage devices.
We study the influence of oxygen vacancies on the formation of charged 180$^circ$ domain walls in ferroelectric BaTiO$_3$ using first principles calculations. We show that it is favorable for vacancies to assemble in crystallographic planes, and that such clustering is accompanied by the formation of a charged domain wall. The domain wall has negative bound charge, which compensates the nominal positive charge of the vacancies and leads to a vanishing density of free charge at the wall. This is in contrast to the positively charged domain walls, which are nearly completely compensated by free charge from the bulk. The results thus explain the experimentally observed difference in electronic conductivity of the two types of domain walls, as well as the generic prevalence of charged domain walls in ferroelectrics. Moreover, the explicit demonstration of vacancy driven domain wall formation implies that specific charged domain wall configurations may be realized by bottom-up design for use in domain wall based information processing.