Planned intervention: On Wednesday April 3rd 05:30 UTC Zenodo will be unavailable for up to 2-10 minutes to perform a storage cluster upgrade.
Published August 14, 2020 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Magnetic domain wall curvature induced by wire edge pinning

  • 1. Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, 91120 Palaiseau, France
  • 2. Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
  • 3. Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France
  • 4. Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica, Strada delle Cacce 91, 10135 Torino, Italy
  • 5. Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Salamanca, Plaza de la Merced s/n., 37008 Salamanca, Spain
  • 6. Singulus Technology AG, Hanauer Landstrasse 103, 63796 Kahl am Main, Germany

Description

In this study, we report on the analysis of the magnetic domain wall (DW) curvature due to magnetic field induced motion in Ta/CoFeB/MgO and Pt/Co/Pt wires with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. In wires of 20 μm and 25 μm, a large edge pinning potential produces the anchoring of the DW ends to the wire edges, which is evidenced as a significant curvature of the DW front as it propagates. As the driving magnetic field is increased, the curvature reduces as a result of the system moving away from the creep regime of DW motion, which implies a weaker dependence of the DW dynamics on the interaction between the DW and the wire edge defects. A simple model is derived to describe the dependence of the DW curvature on the driving magnetic field and allows us to extract the parameter σE, which accounts for the strength of the edge pinning potential. The model describes well the systems with both weak and strong bulk pinning potentials like Ta/CoFeB/MgO and Pt/Co/Pt, respectively. This provides a means to quantify the effect of edge pinning induced DW curvature on magnetic DW dynamics.

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the European Union FP7 and H2020 Programs (MSCA ITN Grant Nos. 608031 and 860060), the French National Research Agency (project ELECSPIN), and Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (Project No. MAT2017-87072-C4-1-P). The authors thank G. van der Jagt for useful comments.

Files

APL-DWCurvature-resubmission_authors version_acknowledged.pdf

Files (1.5 MB)