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- DOI: 10.1038/nature02180
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Subatomic movements of a domain wall in the Peierls potential.
Novoselov, K. S.; Geim, A. K.; Dubonos, S. V.; Hill, E. W.; Grigorieva, I. V
Nature. 2003;426:812-816.
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Full-text held externally
- DOI: 10.1038/nature02180
Abstract
The discrete nature of crystal lattices plays a role in virtually every material property. But it is only when the size of entities hosted by a crystal becomes comparable to the lattice period-as occurs for dislocations, vortexes in superconductors and domain wall that this discreteness is manifest explicitly. The assocd. phenomena are usually described in terms of a background Peierls at. washboard' energy potential, which was 1st introduced for the case of dislocation motion in the 1940s. This concept has subsequently been invoked in many situations to describe certain features in the bulk behavior of materials, but has to date eluded direct detection and exptl. scrutiny at a microscopic level. Here the authors report observations of the motion of a single magnetic domain wall at the scale of the individual peaks and troughs of the at. energy landscape. The authors' expts. reveal that domain walls can become trapped between cryst. planes, and that they propagate by distinct jumps that match the lattice periodicity. The jumps between valleys involve unusual dynamics that shed light on the microscopic processes underlying domain-wall propagation. Such observations offer a means for probing exptl. the physics of topol. defects in discrete lattices-a field rich in phenomena that were subject to extensive theor. study. [on SciFinder (R)]
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