Faster magnetic walls in rough wires

In some magnetic devices that have been proposed, the information is transmitted along a magnetic wire of submicrometre width by domain wall (DW) motion1,2. The speed of the device is obviously linked to the DW velocity, and measured values up to 1 km s−1 have been reported in moderate fields3. Although such velocities were already reached in orthoferrite crystal films with a high anisotropy4, the surprise came from their observation in the low-anisotropy permalloy. We have studied, by numerical simulation, the DW propagation in such samples, and observed a very counter-intuitive behaviour. For perfect samples (no edge roughness), the calculated velocity increased with field up to a threshold, beyond which it abruptly decreased — a well-known phenomenon5. However, for rough strip edges, the velocity breakdown was found to be suppressed. We explain this phenomenon, and propose that roughness should rather be engineered than avoided when fabricating nanostructures for DW propagation.