Chirality tunneling and quantum dynamics for domain walls in mesoscopic ferromagnets

Abstract

We studied the quantum dynamics of ferromagnetic domain walls (topological kink-type solitons) in one-dimensional ferromagnetic spin chains. We show that the tunneling probability does not depend on the number of spins in a domain wall; thus, this probability can be large even for a domain wall containing a large number of spins. We also predict that there is a strong interplay between the tunneling of a wall from one lattice site to another (tunneling of the kink coordinate) and the tunneling of the kink topological charge (so-called chirality). Both of these elementary processes are suppressed for kinks in one-dimensional ferromagnets with half-integer spin. The dispersion law (i.e., the domain wall energy versus momentum) is essentially different for chains with either integer or half-integer spins. The predicted quantum effects could be observed for mesoscopic magnetic structures, e.g., chains of magnetic clusters, large-spin molecules, or nanosize magnetic dots.