Abstract
The control of domain walls is central to nearly all magnetic technologies, particularly for information storage and spintronics. Creative attempts to increase storage density need to overcome volatility due to thermal fluctuations of nanoscopic domains and heating limitations. Topological defects, such as solitons, skyrmions, and merons, may be much less susceptible to fluctuations, owing to topological constraints, while also being controllable with low current densities. Here, we present the first evidence for soliton/soliton and soliton/antisoliton domain walls in the hexagonal chiral magnet Mn1/3NbS2 that respond asymmetrically to magnetic fields and exhibit pair-annihilation. This is important because it suggests the possibility of controlling the occurrence of soliton pairs and the use of small fields or small currents to control nanoscopic magnetic domains. Specifically, our data suggest that either soliton/soliton or soliton/antisoliton pairs can be stabilized by tuning the balance between intrinsic exchange interactions and long-range magnetostatics in restricted geometries.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1205-1212 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Nano Letters |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 10 2021 |
Funding
The experimental material presented here is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under EPSCoR Grant DE-SC0012432 with additional support from the Louisiana Board of Regents. A.K. acknowledges support for the Fresnel imaging in LTEM from the EU’s ERC Horizon 2020 program under Grant Agreement 856538 and from DFG project-ID 405553726–TRR 270. The SANS measurements at ORNL’s HFIR was sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). I.V. acknowledges support from NSF Grant DMR 1410741 for theoretical work and hospitality of the KITP, where part of this research was performed under NSF Grant PHY-1748958. We would like to thank Dr. Ron Kelley from ThermoFisher Scientific for providing access and assistance with their PFIB for sample preparation and TEM imaging. We thank Dr. Dongmei Cao of the Shared Instrument Facilities at Louisiana State University for assistance with sample preparation for the LTEM imaging.
Keywords
- Chiral magnets, and Shape anisotropy
- Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction
- Nanoscopic chiral domain walls
- Soliton pair dynamics