APL Materials (Mar 2016)

Observation of asymmetry in domain wall velocity under transverse magnetic field

  • K.-J. Kim,
  • Y. Yoshimura,
  • T. Okuno,
  • T. Moriyama,
  • S.-W. Lee,
  • K.-J. Lee,
  • Y. Nakatani,
  • T. Ono

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4944897
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 4, no. 3
pp. 032504 – 032504-7

Abstract

Read online

The dynamics of a magnetic domain wall (DW) under a transverse magnetic field Hy are investigated in two-dimensional (2D) Co/Ni microstrips, where an interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) exists with DMI vector D lying in +y direction. The DW velocity exhibits asymmetric behavior for ±Hy; that is, the DW velocity becomes faster when Hy is applied antiparallel to D. The key experimental results are reproduced in a 2D micromagnetic simulation, which reveals that the interfacial DMI suppresses the periodic change of the average DW angle φ even above the Walker breakdown and that Hy changes φ, resulting in a velocity asymmetry. This suggests that the 2D DW motion, despite its microscopic complexity, simply depends on the average angle of the DW and thus can be described using a one-dimensional soliton model. These findings provide insight into the magnetic DW dynamics in 2D systems, which are important for emerging spin-orbitronic applications.