The motion of domain walls is influenced by their internal structure and their structural changes during motion. The macroscopic motion is well understood but the internal dynamics during motion have not been experimentally studied in detail. We study vortex domain walls excited by nanosecond long magnetic field pulses in a pinning potential and above the pinning threshold. The dynamic response is imaged by transmission x-ray microscopy and the structural changes are analyzed. From the directly observed inertial behavior of the wall the domain-wall mass equivalent is estimated. During motion, oscillations of both the vortex core around the center of the domain wall and the domain-wall width are observed. The wall shows a fully elastic behavior by compression and overexpansion when being pushed by the field. Magnetic domain walls in flat nanowires possess unique properties [1]. Although having a rather complex magnetization structure they are, to a large extent, describable as quasiparticles [2]. A controlled motion of these walls can be achieved by magnetic fields [3] and electric currents [4,5]. The equations of motion are first-order differential equations [6] compared to second-order differentials for classical particles. But like classical particles an inertial behavior of domain walls is expected [7] and has been observed for domain walls in nanowires [8][9][10]. This inertial behavior is expressed by an effective mass of the domain wall [7,8,11] that only exist for walls in motion. Their controllable motion under the influence of spin polarized currents and magnetic fields have led to several ideas for applications like nonvolatile memory, logic devices, and sensors [12][13][14]. In general, two types of domainwall motion exist. For low driving forces the walls move as almost rigid particles, while above the Walker breakdown internal dynamics govern the macroscopic motion [2]. The velocity is proportional to the driving force up to the Walker breakdown [2] and the walls move slower for forces just above it. Measurements have shown a good agreement of this behavior between the theoretical description and the macroscopic motion [3,15,16]. However, most experiments so far had no direct access to the internal dynamics of the domain walls that can have strong impact on their behavior. Time-resolved x-ray microscopy has been used to study domain-wall oscillations in confined potentials [11,17] and the fast generation of vortex domain walls [10]. The driven motion of the walls has only been observed in strong fields above the Walker breakdown [10] as strong Oersted field pulses are required for the fast generation of domain walls [18,19]. For applications a detailed understanding of the dynamics in lower driving forces is crucial. We present time-resolved x-ray microscopy of internal dynamics of vortex domain walls under the influence of magnetic field pulses. Oscillations of the wall width as well as of the vortex core are observed. The domain-walls internal structural changes correlate with * fstein@physnet.uni...