Eur. Phys. J. B 60, 15-27 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00320-3

Transient domain wall displacement under spin-polarized current pulses

¹ CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, UMR 8502, 91405 Orsay, France and Univ. Paris-Sud, Bâtiment 510, 91405 Orsay, France
² Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Electrocommunications, Chofu, 182-8585, Tokyo, Japan
³ Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto Univ., Uji, 611-0011, Kyoto, Japan

Corresponding author: ^a thiaville@lps.u-psud.fr

Received: 3 July 2007
Published online: 23 November 2007

Abstract

This paper investigates the non steady-state displacement of magnetic domain walls in a nanostrip submitted to a time-dependent spin-polarized current flowing along the nanostrip. First, numerical micromagnetic simulations show that a domain wall can move under application of a current pulse, and that the displacement resulting from a conversion of the domain wall structure is quantized. The numerical findings are subsequently explained in the framework of simplified analytic models, namely the 1D model and the point-core vortex model. We then introduce the concept of an angle linked to the magnetization of a general domain wall, and show that it allows understanding the transient phenomena quite generally. Simple analytic formulas are derived and compared to experiments. For this, charts are given for the key parameters of the domain wall mechanics, as obtained from numerical micromagnetic simulations. We finally discuss the limitations of this work, by looking at the influence of temperature elevation under current, presence of a non-adiabatic term, and of disorder.