Control of the interaction between pinning disorder and domain walls in Pt/Co/AlOx ultrathin films by He+ ion irradiation

Abstract

We have studied the effect of He+ irradiation on the dynamics of chiral domain walls in Pt/Co/AlOx trilayers in the creep regime. Irradiation leads to a strong decrease in the depinning field and a non-monotonous change of the effective pinning barriers. The variations of domain wall dynamics result essentially from the strong decrease in the effective anisotropy constant, which increases the domain wall width. The latter is found to present a perfect scaling with the length-scale of the interaction between domain wall and disorder, ξ. On the other hand, the strength of the domain wall–disorder interaction, fpin, is weakly impacted by the irradiation, suggesting that the length-scales of the disorder fluctuation remain smaller than the domain wall width.