English

Current-induced torques in textured Rashba ferromagnets

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2013-05-30 v1

Abstract

In systems with small spin-orbit coupling, current-induced torques on the magnetization require inhomogeneous magnetization textures. For large spin-orbit coupling, such torques exist even without gradients in the magnetization direction. Here, we consider current-induced torques in ferromagnetic metals with both Rashba spin-orbit coupling and inhomogeneous magnetization. We first phenomenologically construct all torques that are allowed by the symmetries of the system, to first order in magnetization-direction gradients and electric field. Second, we use a Boltzmann approach to calculate the spin torques that arise to second order in the spin-orbit coupling. We apply our results to current-driven domain walls and find that the domain-wall mobility is strongly affected by torques that result from the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and inhomogeneity of the magnetization texture.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.0653,
  title  = {Current-induced torques in textured Rashba ferromagnets},
  author = {E. van der Bijl and R. A. Duine},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.0653},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:58:05.911Z