Ultrafast time-evolution of chiral Néel magnetic domain walls probed by circular dichroism in x-ray resonant magnetic scattering.

Abstract

Non-collinear spin textures in ferromagnetic ultrathin films are attracting a renewed interest fueled by possible fine engineering of several magnetic interactions, notably the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. This allows the stabilization of complex chiral spin textures such as chiral magnetic domain walls (DWs), spin spirals, and magnetic skyrmions. We report here on the ultrafast behavior of chiral DWs after optical pumping in perpendicularly magnetized asymmetric multilayers, probed using time-resolved circular dichroism in x-ray resonant magnetic scattering (CD-XRMS). We observe a picosecond transient reduction of the CD-XRMS, which is attributed to the spin current-induced coherent and incoherent torques within the continuously dependent spin texture of the DWs. We argue that a specific demagnetization of the inner structure of the DW induces a flow of spins from the interior of the neighboring magnetic domains. We identify this time-varying change of the DW texture shortly after the laser pulse as a distortion of the homochiral Néel shape toward a transient mixed Bloch-Néel-Bloch texture along a direction transverse to the DW.

Ultrafast Polarization-Tunable Monochromatic Extreme Ultraviolet Source at High-Repetition-Rate

“…For this reason, many synchrotron beamlines around the world are dedicated to static XUV circular dichroism experiments in atoms, molecules, and solids in their ground state [85,86,87,88,89]. One of the burgeoning goals in the community is to extend such XUV dichroism experiments to the ultrafast regime, where dynamical out-of-equilibrium properties of matter can be investigated [90,42,91,92,43,93]. The ultrashort duration of XUV pulses generated using high-order harmonic generation makes this approach very appealing for pushing this goal forward.…”