We investigate diffusive transport through a number of domain wall (DW) profiles of the important magnetic alloy Permalloy taking into account simultaneously noncollinearity, alloy disorder, and spin-orbit coupling fully quantum mechanically, from first principles. In addition to observing the known effects of magnetization mistracking and anisotropic magnetoresistance, we discover a not-previously identified contribution to the resistance of a DW that comes from spin-orbit-coupling-mediated spin-flip scattering in a textured diffusive ferromagnet. This adiabatic DW resistance, which should exist in all diffusive DWs, can be observed by varying the DW width in a systematic fashion in suitably designed nanowires.
@article{arxiv.1207.6277,
title = {Spin-orbit-coupling induced domain-wall resistance in diffusive ferromagnets},
author = {Zhe Yuan and Yi Liu and Anton A. Starikov and Paul J. Kelly and Arne Brataas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.6277},
year = {2013}
}