No Arabic abstract
We present a theory of the current-voltage characteristics of a magnetic domain wall between two highly spin-polarized materials, which takes into account the effect of the electrical bias on the spin-flip probability of an electron crossing the wall. We show that increasing the voltage reduces the spin-flip rate, and is therefore equivalent to reducing the width of the domain wall. As an application, we show that this effect widens the temperature window in which the operation of a unipolar spin diode is nearly ideal.
In magnetic nanowires with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) magnetic domain walls (DW) are narrow and can move rapidly driven by current induced torques. This enables important applications like high-density memories for which the precise detection of the position and motion of a propagating DW is of utmost interest. Todays DW detection tools are often limited in resolution, or acquisition speed, or can only be applied on specific materials. Here, we show that the anomalous Nernst effect provides a simple and powerful tool to precisely track the position and motion of a single DW propagating in a PMA nanowire. We detect field and current driven DW propagation in both metallic heterostructures and dilute magnetic semiconductors over a broad temperature range. The demonstrated spatial resolution below 20 nm is comparable to the DW width in typical metallic PMA systems.
A domain wall separating two oppositely magnetized regions in a ferromagnetic semiconductor exhibits, under appropriate conditions, strongly nonlinear I-V characteristics similar to those of a p-n diode. We study these characteristics as functions of wall width and temperature. As the width increases or the temperature decreases, direct tunneling between the majority spin bands decreases the effectiveness of the diode. This has important implications for the zero-field quenched resistance of magnetic semiconductors and for the design of a recently proposed spin transistor.
We present a theoretical study of spin-dependent transport through a ferromagnetic domain wall. With an increase of the number of components of the exchange coupling, we have observed that the variance of the conductance becomes half. As the strength of the domain wall magnetization is increased, negative magnetoresistance is also observed.
Most of the existing researches on the dynamics of a domain wall (DW) have focused on the effect of DC biases, where the induced velocity is determined by the bias strength. Here we show that AC biases such as a field or a current are also able to move a DW via synchronization between the DW angle and the phase of the AC bias. The resulting DW velocity is proportional to the driving frequency of the AC bias, but independent of the bias strength, offering potentially low-power operations of DW devices. The AC-bias-driven DW motion is shown to exhibit a phase locking-unlocking transition, a critical phenomenon akin to the Walker breakdown of a DC-bias-driven DW motion. Our work shows that a DW can be driven resonantly by synchronizing its angle to AC biases, shedding a light on hitherto overlooked utility of internal degree of freedom for driving magnetic textures.
The scalability of quantum networks based on solid-state spin qubits is hampered by the short range of natural spin-spin interactions. Here, we propose a scheme to entangle distant spin qubits via the soft modes of an antiferromagnetic domain wall (DW). As spin qubits, we focus on quantum impurities (QIs) placed in the vicinity of an insulating antiferromagnetic thin film. The low-energy modes harbored by the DW are embedded in the antiferromagnetic bulk, whose intrinsic spin-wave dynamics have a gap that can exceed the THz range. By setting the QI frequency and the temperature well within the bulk gap, we focus on the dipolar interaction between the QI and two soft modes localized at the DW. One is a string-like mode associated with transverse displacements of the DW position, while the dynamics of the other, corresponding to planar rotations of the Neel order parameter, constitute a spin superfluid. By choosing the geometry in which the QI does not couple to the string mode, we use an external magnetic field to control the gap of the spin superfluid and the qubit-qubit coupling it engenders. We suggest that a tunable micron-range coherent coupling between qubits can be established using common antiferromagnetic materials.