Piezoelectric control of the mobility of a domain wall driven by adiabatic and non-adiabatic torques

The rich internal degrees of freedom of magnetic domain walls make them an attractive complement to electron charge for exploring new concepts of storage, transport and processing of information. Here we use the tunable internal structure of a domain wall in a perpendicularly magnetized GaMnAsP/GaAs ferromagnetic semiconductor and demonstrate devices in which piezoelectrically controlled magnetic anisotropy yields up to 500% mobility variations for an electrical-current-driven domain wall. We observe current-induced domain wall motion over a wide range of current-pulse amplitudes and report a direct observation and the piezoelectric control of the Walker breakdown separating two regimes with different mobilities. Our work demonstrates that in spin-orbit-coupled ferromagnets with weak extrinsic domain wall pinning, the piezoelectric control allows one to experimentally assess the upper and lower boundaries of the characteristic ratio of adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin-transfer torques in the current-driven domain wall motion. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.