Spontaneous domain nucleation under in-plane fields in ultrathin films with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

In this paper, we show that applying a hard axis field reduces the energy barrier for the spontaneous formation of a multi-domain state in magnetic ultrathin films sandwiched between a heavy metal and an oxide. This provides a simple technique to generate a metastable multi-domain state in magnetic films where the ground state is uniform. This approach could be particularly interesting in materials with strong Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction as a means to realize metastable chiral textures.
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF-CCS-1408172)