Understanding current-driven dynamics of magnetic Néel walls in heavy metal/ferromagnetic metal/oxide trilayers

Abstract

We consider analytically current-driven dynamics of magnetic Néel walls in heavy metal/ferromagnetic metal/oxide trilayers where strong spin–orbit coupling and interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (i-DMI) coexist. We show that field-like spin–orbit torque (FL-SOT) with effective field along ${\bf{n}}\times \hat{{\bf{J}}}$ ( n being the interface normal and $\hat{{\bf{J}}}$ being the charge current direction) and i-DMI induced torque can both lead to Walker breakdown suppression meanwhile leaving the wall mobility (velocity versus current density) unchanged. However, i-DMI itself can not induce the ‘universal absence of Walker breakdown’ (UAWB) while FL-SOT exceeding a certain threshold can. Finitely-enlarged Walker limits before UAWB are theoretically calculated and well explain existing data. In addition, change in wall mobility and even its sign-inversion can be understood only if the anti-damping-like SOT is appended. For Néel walls in ferromagnetic-metal layer with both perpendicular and in-plane anisotropies, we have calculated the respective modifications of wall mobility under the coexistence of spin-transfer torque, SOTs and i-DMI. Analytics shows that in trilayers with perpendicular anisotropy strong enough spin Hall angle and appropriate sign of i-DMI parameter can lead to sign-inversion in wall mobility even under small enough current density, while in those with in-plane anisotropy this only occurs for current density in a specific range.

Keywords

• spin–orbit coupling
• interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction
• spin–orbit torque
• magnetic Néel walls
• current-driven dynamics