Dynamics of a trapped domain wall in a current perpendicular to the plane spin valve nano-structure

Abstract

A study of transverse tail-to-tail magnetic domain walls (DW) in novel current perpendicular to the plane (CPP) spin valves (SV) of various dimensions is presented. For films with dimensions larger than the DW width, we find that DW motion can give rise to a substantial low frequency noise. For dimensions comparable to the DW width, we show that the DW can be controlled by an external field or by a spin momentum torque as opposed to the case of CPP-SV with uniform magnetization. It is shown that in a single domain biased CPP-SV, the spin torque can give rise to 1/f-type noise. The dipolar field, the spin torque and the Oersted field are all accounted for in this work. Our proposed SV requires low current densities to move DW and can simulate devices for logical operation or magnetic sensing without having to switch the magnetization in the free layer.