We study the motion of a domain wall on an ultrathin magnetic film using the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE). At tiny magnetic fields, the wall creeps only via thermal activation over the pinning centers present in the sample. Our results show that this creep dynamics is highly intermittent and correlated. A localized instability triggers a cascade, akin to aftershocks following a large earthquake, where the pinned wall undergoes large reorganizations in a compact active region for a few seconds. Surprisingly, the size and shape of these reorganizations display the same scale-free statistics of the depinning avalanches in agreement with the quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class.
@article{arxiv.2309.12898,
title = {Earthquake-like dynamics in ultrathin magnetic film},
author = {Gianfranco Durin and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti and Marco Baiesi and Arianna Casiraghi and Alessandro Magni and Liza Herrera-Diez and Dafiné Ravelosona and Laura Foini and Alberto Rosso},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.12898},
year = {2024}
}