A numerical approach to incorporate intrinsic material defects in micromagnetic simulations

Abstract

Spintronics devices like racetrack memory rely on the controlled movement of domain walls in magnetic nanowires. The effects of distributed disorder on this movement have not yet been studied extensively. Defects give rise to a pinning potential that can be characterized in terms of a depth and an interaction range. We investigate how the effects of defects can be realistically introduced in micromagnetic simulations by comparing the properties of the pinning potential to experimental results in the literature. We show that the full 3-dimensional simulations can be replaced by equivalent 2-dimensional ones and propose two approaches to include defects.