Current induced generation and synchronous motion of highly packed coupled chiral domain walls

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the creation and synchronized movement of densely packed chiral domain walls driven by current, revealing their potential for high-density memory storage applications.

Contribution

It uncovers a universal short-range repulsion among chiral domain walls and shows how to generate and manipulate highly packed walls using current pulses.

Findings

Existence of a universal short-range repulsion among chiral domain walls.

Application of out-of-plane field reduces the distance between walls, enabling coupled walls.

A single current pulse can generate many closely spaced domain walls.

Abstract

Chiral domain walls of Neel type emerge in heterostructures that include heavy metal (HM) and ferromagnetic metal (FM) layers owing to the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction at the HM/FM interface. In developing storage class memories based on the current induced motion of chiral domain walls, it remains to be seen how dense such domain walls can be packed together. Here we show that a universal short range repulsion that scales with the strength of the DM interaction exists among chiral domain walls. The distance between the two walls can be reduced with application of out of plane field, allowing formation of coupled domain walls. Surprisingly, the current driven velocity of such coupled walls is independent of the out of plane field, enabling manipulation of significantly compressed coupled domain walls using current pulses. Moreover, we find that a single current pulse with optimum amplitude can create a large number of closely spaced domain walls. These features allow current induced generation and synchronous motion of highly packed chiral domain walls, a key feature essential for developing domain wall based storage devices.