Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling and Dissipation of Domain Wall in Ferromagnetic Metals

TL;DR

This paper investigates macroscopic quantum tunneling of domain walls in ferromagnetic metals, emphasizing the role of conduction electron dissipation and its dependence on wall thickness, using an effective action approach and instanton calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating conduction electron dissipation into domain wall tunneling analysis and quantifies its impact based on wall thickness.

Findings

Dissipation significantly reduces tunneling rate for thin walls.

Dissipation effects are negligible for thick or mesoscopic walls.

Ohmic dissipation exists at zero temperature due to the Fermi surface.

Abstract

The depinning of a domain wall in ferromagentic metal via macroscopic quantum tunneling is studied based on the Hubbard model. The dynamics of the magnetization verctor is shown to be governed by an effective action of Heisenberg model with a term non-local in time that describes the dissipation due to the conduction electron. Due to the existence of the Fermi surface there exists Ohmic dissipation even at zero temperature, which is crucially different from the case of the insulator. Taking into account the effect of pinning and the external magnetic field the action is rewritten in terms of a collective coordinate, the position of the wall, $Q$. The tunneling rate for $Q$ is calculated by use of the instanton method. It is found that the reduction of the tunneling rate due to the dissipation is very large for a thin domain wall with thickness of a few times the lattice spacing, but is negligible for a thick domain wall. Dissipation due to eddy current is shown to be negligible for a wall of mesoscopic size.