Vincent Jeudy

Magnetic domain walls display universal, disorder-controlled elastic dynamics at low drive, and texture-governed free motion at high drive. Here, we establish the crossover mechanism between these two regimes. Using experiments in ultrathin epitaxial iron garnet films and Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert simulations, including disorder, thermal, and internal texture effects, we uncover a disorder- and temperature-dependent precessional flow that bridges pinned and free dynamics. We further demonstrate that the exceptionally low pinning in garnets arises from the weak coupling between domain walls and disorder, together with a correlation length that exceeds the wall width.

Domain wall (DW) dynamics in antiferromagnetic (AFM) systems offer the advantages over their ferromagnetic counterparts of having faster and more energy efficient manipulation due to the absence of net magnetization, leading to reduced magnetic crosstalk and improved performance in spintronic devices. A comprehensive analysis of DW dynamics across regimes such as creep, depinning, and flow is well established in ferromagnetic systems but remains lacking in AFM-coupled systems. In this study, we explore the nature of DW dynamics in synthetic ferrimagnetic multilayers composed of Pt|Co|Tb|Al for different Tb thickness, focusing on the underlying pinning parameters, and on the different regimes of DW dynamics driven by spin-orbit torques (SOTs). We find that due to the AFM coupling between Co and Tb, the magnetic moment of Tb increases with Tb thickness resulting in a reduced saturation magnetization and an enhanced depinning field. The DW disorder interaction is found to vary weakly with the AFM coupling between Co and Tb, while the complete withdrawal of the Tb layer strongly increases the anisotropy and the DW pinning. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to measure effective SOTs by comparing depinning transitions in current and field-induced DW motion. This research reveals new insights into DW dynamics in coupled AFM systems, highlighting enhancements in mobility through optimized SOTs and pinning landscapes.

We explore the contributions of adiabatic and nonadiabatic spin-transfer torques (STT) of a spin-polarized current to the thermally activated creep motion of domain walls in a thin (Ga,Mn)(As,P) film with perpendicular anisotropy. The nonadiabatic STT is found to compensate linearly an external magnetic field, with a slope compatible with a steady domain-wall internal structure. Close to the compensation, the adiabatic contribution is strongly enhanced and may both increase or reduce domain-wall velocity, which we associate to variations of creep pinning energy barrier with domain-wall internal structure. Far from compensation, the effects of adiabatic STT become negligible and so field and current driven domain-wall motion presents common universal behaviors described by the quenched Edwards Wilkinson universality class.

We have studied the effect of He+ irradiation on the dynamics of chiral domain walls in Pt/Co/AlOx trilayers in the creep regime. Irradiation leads to a strong decrease in the depinning field and a non-monotonous change of the effective pinning barriers. The variations of domain wall dynamics result essentially from the strong decrease in the effective anisotropy constant, which increases the domain wall width. The latter is found to present a perfect scaling with the length-scale of the interaction between domain wall and disorder, ξ. On the other hand, the strength of the domain wall–disorder interaction, fpin, is weakly impacted by the irradiation, suggesting that the length-scales of the disorder fluctuation remain smaller than the domain wall width.