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Electron Transport in Ferromagnetic Nanostructures

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Atomic- and Nanoscale Magnetism

Part of the book series: NanoScience and Technology ((NANO))

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Abstract

The proposal of logic- and memory devices based on magnetic domain-wall motion in nanostructures created a great demand on the understanding of the dynamics of domain walls. We describe the controlled creation and annihilation of domain walls by Oersted-field pulses as well as their internal dynamics during motion. Electric measurements of the magnetoresistance are utilized to identify permanent- or temporal creation and continuous motion of domain walls initiated by nanosecond short field pulses in external magnetic fields. The injection of domain walls into nanowires with control of their magnetic pattern (transverse or vortex), their type (head-to-head or tail-to-tail magnetization orientation) and their sense of magnetization rotation (clockwise or counter clockwise chirality) is reliably achieved. Influencing the creation process of consecutively created domain walls to obtain multiple walls inside one wire or to mutually annihilate the walls is found to be possible by changes of magnetic field parameters. The time structure of the creation process is analysed by time-resolved transmission X-ray microscopy. After complete formation wall transformations are observed above a critical driving field known as the Walker breakdown. Internal excitations of vortex domain walls are also found in low field motion. A strong interplay between internal dynamics and the macroscopic motion is identified.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Named after L. R. Walker based on unpublished calculations on domain walls that have been redone and published in [38].

  2. 2.

    Actual domain wall widths in nanowires are about \(3\lambda \) as calculated in [39].

  3. 3.

    In [56] a wrong numerical value \(\lambda =0.13\) nm was written on page 2 line 78. Still the calculation had been carried out with the correct value of \(\lambda =0.27\) nm in the publication.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ulrich Merkt for continuous support and fruitful discussions over many years. We thank MarkusWeigand, Hermann Stoll, and Gisela Schütz, Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany as well as Mi-Young Im and Peter Fischer, LBNL Berkeley, CA,USA for excellent, long-standing cooperation. We acknowledge financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft via SFB 668 ’Magnetism from the Single Atom to the Nanostructure’, via Graduiertenkolleg 1286 ’Functional Metal-Semiconductor Hybrid Systems’, and via excellence cluster ’The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging - Structure, Dynamics and Control of Matter on the Atomic Scale’.

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  1. Max-Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761, Hamburg, Germany

    Falk-Ulrich Stein & Guido Meier

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  1. Falk-Ulrich Stein
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Correspondence to Guido Meier .

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  1. Department of Physics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Roland Wiesendanger

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Stein, FU., Meier, G. (2018). Electron Transport in Ferromagnetic Nanostructures. In: Wiesendanger, R. (eds) Atomic- and Nanoscale Magnetism. NanoScience and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99558-8_18

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