Breaking chirality in nonequilibrium systems

Abstract

At equilibrium, Bloch walls are chiral interfaces between domains with different magnetization. Far from equilibrium, a set of forced oscillators can exhibit walls between states with different phases. In this Letter, we show that when these walls become chiral, they move with a velocity simply related to their chirality. This surprising behavior is a straightforward consequence of nonvariational effects, which are typical of nonequilibrium systems.