SFB 1238 | February 19, 14:30

Topological defects and domain walls in chiral magnets

Dennis Meier

Domain walls naturally arise whenever a symmetry is spontaneously broken. They interconnect regions with different realizations of the broken symmetry, promoting structure formation from cosmological length scales to the atomic level. In my talk, I will present 1D spin textures and domain walls with intriguing physical properties, which emerge in spin-spiral multiferroics and chiral magnets and which hold great promise for nanoelectronics and spintronics applications. In particular, I will discuss that a wide variety of new domain walls occurs in the presence of spatially modulated domain states. In contrast to domain walls in conventional ferroics, such domain walls exhibit a well-defined inner structure, which—analogous to cholesteric liquid crystals—consists of topological disclination and dislocation defects. Similar to the magnetic skyrmions, the domain walls can carry a finite topological charge, permitting an efficient coupling to spin currents and contributions to a topological Hall effect. Our studies establish domain walls in chiral magnets as functional nano-objects with non-trivial topology, opening the door to innovative device concepts in information and communication nanotechnology.


Uni Trondheim
Seminar Room of the Institute of Physics II
Contact: T. Lorenz