Domain-wall orientation in antiferromagnets controlled by magnetoelastic effects

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical framework to analyze how magnetoelastic effects influence the orientation of domain walls in antiferromagnets, providing insights into their equilibrium configurations and energy dependencies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mathematical approach to model the equilibrium configurations of antiferromagnetic domain walls considering magnetoelastic effects.

Findings

Angular dependence of elastic and magnetoelastic energies computed.

Equilibrium domain wall orientations determined by energy minimization.

Nonlinear PDEs solved for various domain wall configurations.

Abstract

In this paper, we develop the mathematical framework to describe the physical phenomenon behind the equilibrium configuration joining two antiferromagnetic domains. We firstly define the total energy of the system and deduce the governing equations by minimizing it with respect to the field variables. Then, we solve the resulting system of nonlinear PDEs together with proper initial and boundary conditions by varying the orientation of the 90$^{\circ}$ domain wall (DW) configuration along the sample. Finally, the angular dependence of elastic and magnetoelastic energies as well as of incompatibility-driven volume effects is computed.