Domain walls in finite-width nanowires with interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

Abstract

It is widely known that the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) may stabilize N\'eel walls rather than Bloch walls in magnetic thin films. When the DMI is weak, it results in a ``tilted'' Bloch wall. However, for most applications, domain walls are in nanowires rather than thin films. Here we present a semianalytic two-parameter calculation for the static domain wall in a nanowire of finite width and thickness, with DMI. The DMI strength that is needed to force a N\'eel wall is smaller in nanowires than in films due to demagnetizing energy. Even nanowires that are hundreds of nanometers wide may have different domain wall solutions than thin films and so their finite size must be considered. The impact of this result on current experiments is briefly discussed. We extend the model to show that applying a weak magnetic field allows the domain wall type to be tuned.