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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Earthquakelike dynamics in ultrathin magnetic films

Gianfranco Durin1, Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti2,3, Marco Baiesi4,5, Arianna Casiraghi1, Alessandro Magni1, Liza Herrera-Diez6, Dafiné Ravelosona6, Laura Foini7, and Alberto Rosso2

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Phys. Rev. B 110, L020405 – Published 12 July, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.110.L020405

Abstract

We study the motion of a domain wall on an ultrathin magnetic film using the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE). Our measurements were conducted at magnetic fields approximately 2% of the depinning field where the wall creeps only via thermal activation over the pinning centers present in the sample. Our results show that this creep dynamics is highly intermittent and correlated. A localized instability triggers a cascade, akin to aftershocks following a large earthquake, where the pinned wall undergoes large reorganizations in a compact active region for a few seconds. The analysis of their scale-free statistics enables us to solve an intricate, long-standing problem: thermal avalanches exist in the creep regime and they are depinning-like even for very low magnetic field. Moreover, we show that their sizes and shapes belong to the depinning quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class.

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Phys. Rev. B 110, L020405– Published 12 July, 2024
  • Received 15 August 2023
  • Revised 6 February 2024
  • Accepted 7 June 2024
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