(Ir-)Reversibility and thermal equilibrium in magnetic domain pattern formation in ultra-thin ferromagnetic films

Abstract

We investigate the details of pattern formation and transitions between different modulated phases in ultra-thin Fe films on Cu(001). At high temperature, the transitions between the uniform saturated state, the bubble state and the striped state are completely reversible, while at low temperature the bubble phase is avoided. The observed non-equilibrium behavior can be qualitatively explained by considering the intrinsic energy barriers appearing in the system due to the competition between the short-ranged exchange and the long-ranged dipolar interactions. Our experiments suggest that the height of these energy barriers is related to the domain size and is therefore strongly temperature dependent.

12 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (5)

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• Stripe glasses: self generated randomness in a uniformly frustrated system
• Stability of periodic domain structures in a two-dimensional dipolar model
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Cited by in corpus (16)

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• Inverse transition in the two dimensional dipolar frustrated ferromagnet
• On the mechanism behind the inverse melting in systems with competing interactions
• Microscopic approach to orientational order of domain walls
• Modulated phases in external fields: when is reentrant behavior to be expected?
• Finite temperature phase diagram of ultrathin magnetic films without external fields
• Pair correlations and structure factor of the $J_1$-$J_2$ square lattice Ising model in an external field within the Cluster Variation Method
• Topological phase diagrams of the frustrated Ising ferromagnet
• Domain-wall free energy in Heisenberg ferromagnets
• Inverse transition in the dipolar frustrated Ising ferromagnet: the role of domain walls
• Inverse transitions and disappearance of the λ-line in the asymmetric random field Ising and Blume-Capel models
• The frustrated spherical model: an alternative to Ginzburg-Landau Hamiltonians with competing interactions