Friday, May 4, 2012

1205.0653 (E. van der Bijl et al.)

Current-induced torques in textured Rashba ferromagnets    [PDF]

E. van der Bijl, R. A. Duine
In systems with small spin-orbit coupling, current-induced torques on the magnetization require inhomogeneous magnetization textures. For large spin-orbit coupling, such torques exist even without gradients in the magnetization direction. Here, we consider current-induced torques in ferromagnetic metals with both Rashba spin-orbit coupling and inhomogeneous magnetization. We first phenomenologically construct all torques that are allowed by the symmetries of the system, to first order in magnetization-direction gradients and electric field. Second, we use a Boltzmann approach to calculate the spin torques that arise to second order in the spin-orbit coupling. We apply our results to current-driven domain walls and find that the domain-wall mobility is strongly affected by torques that result from the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and inhomogeneity of the magnetization texture.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0653

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