Effective Field Model of Roughness in Magnetic Structures

TL;DR

This paper introduces an effective field model within micromagnetics to analyze the impact of sub-exchange length roughness on magnetic structures, enabling accurate simulations of roughness effects without complex mesh refinement.

Contribution

The novel model separates roughness effects as an effective anisotropy, validated against direct roughening simulations, and applied to study vortex domain wall dynamics with surface roughness.

Findings

Effective anisotropy due to roughness accurately modeled

Model agrees with direct roughness simulations up to exchange length

Surface roughness significantly affects domain wall mobility and pinning

Abstract

An effective field model is introduced here within the micromagnetics formulation, to study roughness in magnetic structures, by considering sub-exchange length roughness levels as a perturbation on a smooth structure. This allows the roughness contribution to be separated, which is found to give rise to an effective configurational anisotropy for both edge and surface roughness, and accurately model its effects with fine control over the roughness depth without the explicit need to refine the computational cellsize to accommodate the roughness profile. The model is validated by comparisons with directly roughened structures for a series of magnetization switching and domain wall mobility simulations and found to be in excellent agreement for roughness levels up to the exchange length. The model is further applied to vortex domain wall mobility simulations with surface roughness, which is shown to significantly modify domain wall movement and result in dynamic pinning and stochastic creep effects.