Deterministic roughening in the dc-driven precessional regime of domain walls

Abstract

We numerically study the dynamics of extended domain walls in homogeneous ferromagnets driven by a uniform magnetic field at zero temperature. Using both micromagnetic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert simulations and a collective-coordinate description, we show that flat chiral domain walls become linearly unstable above the Walker breakdown field and below a higher threshold, provided their length exceeds a characteristic scale. This instability is captured by a quasi-universal spectral stability diagram, parameterized solely by the Gilbert damping, which predicts the onset of deviations from rigid-wall behavior. Beyond the linear regime, large domain walls with bands of unstable modes develop spatiotemporal chaos, intricate Bloch-line dynamics, and deterministic roughening. At a critical field, the system undergoes a dynamical phase transition from a flat to a rough moving phase with universal features. Our results provide a framework for addressing domain-wall dynamics in the presence of thermal fluctuations and quenched disorder by disentangling their effects from intrinsic deterministic instabilities.