Néel domain walls with bistable chirality in a perpendicularly magnetized ferrimagnetic insulator

Yixuan Song; Siying Huang; David Bono; Jerzy T Sadowski; Caroline A Ross; Geoffrey S D Beach

doi:10.1038/s41467-025-60412-1

Néel domain walls with bistable chirality in a perpendicularly magnetized ferrimagnetic insulator

Nat Commun. 2025 Jun 4;16(1):5201. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60412-1.

Authors

Yixuan Song^#¹, Siying Huang^#¹, David Bono¹, Jerzy T Sadowski², Caroline A Ross³, Geoffrey S D Beach⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
² Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, 11973-5000, USA.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA. caross@mit.edu.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA. gbeach@mit.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Field-free spin-orbit torque-driven domain wall motion in magnetic thin films with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) requires the domain walls to have Néel character. Conventionally, Néel domain walls are stabilized by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in ultrathin films. Here, in a europium iron garnet thin film with PMA and an additional uniaxial in-plane anisotropy, we demonstrate two bistable Néel domain wall states in the absence of DMI, and the capability to toggle the wall states with an in-plane field pulse and consequently their directions of motion under a current pulse. We present a phase diagram for the bistable Néel domain wall states as a function of in-plane field pulse width and amplitude. By fitting the experimental data to an analytical model of Néel wall reversal through the nucleation and propagation of Bloch lines, we extract the length of the initial reversed domain wall segment and Bloch line nucleation energy barrier. Current-driven motion of in-plane anisotropy stabilized Néel walls is qualitatively different from that of DMI-stabilized ones owing to the different symmetry of the effective fields that stabilize the Néel configuration. Furthermore, we present a proof of principle demonstration for 2-bit random number generation based on the stochastic reversal of domain wall chirality. These results provide critical insight into the topological energy barrier of Bloch lines and identify paths towards domain wall-based memory and computing devices.

Abstract

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