Non-Degeneracy and Effects of Pinning in Strongly Coupled Vortex Pairs.

We study the effects of pinning on the quasi-static behavior of stacked, strongly coupled spin-vortex pairs in magnetic multilayered nanopillars, with vertical vortex separation small compared with the vortex-core size. The small separation causes the core–core interaction to be the dominant energy contribution for small applied fields and excitations, which results in highly non-linear dynamics. The properties of such a vortex pair are expected to only be dependent on the relative vortex core polarizations and relative chiralities, so that the individual configurations should be degenerated. We show how pinning can lift this degeneracy, which can be used to distinguish the individual chirality configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]