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Nanoscale mechanics of antiferromagnetic domain walls

Nature Physics volume 17, pages 574–577 (2021)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 02 March 2021

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Abstract

Antiferromagnets can encode information in their ordered magnetic structure, providing the basis for future spintronic devices1,2,3. The control and understanding of antiferromagnetic domain walls, which are the interfaces between domains with differing order parameter orientations, are key ingredients for advancing antiferromagnetic spintronic technologies. However, studies of the intrinsic mechanics of individual antiferromagnetic domain walls are difficult because they require sufficiently pure materials and suitable experimental approaches to address domain walls on the nanoscale. Here we nucleate isolated 180° domain walls in a single crystal of Cr2O3, a prototypical collinear magnetoelectric antiferromagnet, and study their interaction with topographic features fabricated on the sample. We demonstrate domain wall manipulation through the resulting engineered energy landscape and show that the observed interaction is governed by the surface energy of the domain wall. We propose a topographically defined memory architecture based on antiferromagnetic domain walls. Our results advance the understanding of domain wall mechanics in antiferromagnets.

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Fig. 1: Sample structure and domain wall imaging on single-crystal antiferromagnetic Cr2O3.
Fig. 2: Mechanics of an antiferromagnetic domain wall.
Fig. 3: Engineered pinning and controlled manipulation of antiferromagnetic domain walls.

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Data availability

Source data are provided with this paper. All data shown are available from Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.394199441.

Code availability

The spin lattice simulation software40 used in this paper is available at http://slasi.knu.ua.

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Acknowledgements

We thank O. Gomonay and S. A. Díaz for fruitful discussions and M. Fiebig and M. Giraldo for optical characterization of our Cr2O3 samples at an early stage of the experiment. We also thank M. Kasperczyk and P. Amrein for their help with efficient implementations of the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, A. Kákay at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf for providing us with computation time for micromagnetics, and D. Broadway and L. Thiel for valuable input on figures. Finally, we thank A. V. Tomilo at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv for his help with the spin-lattice simulations as well as for his very helpful insight. We gratefully acknowledge financial support through the National Centre of Competence in Research, Quantum Science and Technology, a competence centre funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the Swiss Nanoscience Institute, and support by the Future and Emerging Technologies Open flagship ASTERIQS project of the European Union (grant no. 820394), Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 188521), German Research Foundation (projects MA 5144/22−1, MC 9/22-1 and MA 5144/24−1) and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (project no. 19BF052−01).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Natascha Hedrich, Kai Wagner, Brendan J. Shields & Patrick Maletinsky

  2. Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf e.V., Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research, Dresden, Germany

    Oleksandr V. Pylypovskyi, Tobias Kosub & Denys Makarov

  3. Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

    Denis D. Sheka

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  1. Natascha Hedrich
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Contributions

P.M., D.M., T.K., N.H. and B.J.S. conceived the experiment. N.H., B.J.S. and K.W. performed the NV magnetometry experiments and analysed the resulting data. N.H., K.W. and B.J.S. performed the nanofabrication. O.V.P. and D.D.S. performed the numerical simulations and analytical calculations. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Denys Makarov or Patrick Maletinsky.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Physics thanks Christian Binek, Chunhui Du and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections I–X and Figs. 1–10.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Numerical data for generating the line cut in Fig. 1d.

Source Data Fig. 2

Numerical data (measured, simulated and calculated) for generating the plot in Fig. 2b.

Source Data Fig. 3

Numerical data from simulations for reproducing the line plot in Fig. 3c.

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Hedrich, N., Wagner, K., Pylypovskyi, O.V. et al. Nanoscale mechanics of antiferromagnetic domain walls. Nat. Phys. 17, 574–577 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-01157-0

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