Domain wall dynamics across magnetic and spin compensation points in ferrimagnets

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase of interest in the dynamics of ferrimagnetic materials, in particular in the motion of domain walls [1-4]. Ferrimagnetic materials represent unique systems where the ease of manipulating the spins with applied magnetic fields is combined with exchange-driven acceleration of the internal spin dynamics. Of particular interest is the temperature range around the magnetic and spin compensation points, finely balancing both magnetic moment and angular momentum of the system, and leading to a very particular character of magnetic switching by the domain wall motion.Here we present our studies of the temperature-dependent domain wall dynamics in the temperature range covering both angular momentum and magnetization compensation points in garnet film, and reaching up to the Curie temperature [5]. This is made possible by the very low coercive field of the material, not exceeding 5 mT even in the close vicinity of magnetization compensation temperature. The sample used in our experiments is a single-crystal thin film of magnetic garnet. A very unusual behavior of the domain-wall dynamics is observed, such as extraordinarily high mobility of the domain walls at very low fields. Drastic changes of both domain-wall velocity and mobility by more than 2 orders of magnitude are observed across a relatively small temperature range, related to the delicate balance of magnetization and spins of iron and rare-earth sublattices [5]. Therefore, such fine tuning of the corresponding momenta could be the key for developing ultrafast ferrimagnetic spintronic devices.The work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Projects No. 18-52-16006, 18-29-27020) and the Government of the Russian Federation (Project No. 075-15-2019-1874).