title: Current-controlled magnetic domain-wall nanowire shift register.
abstract: The controlled motion of a series of domain walls along magnetic nanowires using spin-polarized current pulses is the essential ingredient of the proposed magnetic racetrack memory, a new class of potential non-volatile storage-class memories. Using permalloy nanowires, we achieved the successive creation, motion, and detection of domain walls by using sequences of properly timed, nanosecond-long, spin-polarized current pulses. The cycle time for the writing and shifting of the domain walls was a few tens of nanoseconds. Our results illustrate the basic concept of a magnetic shift register that relies on the phenomenon of spin-momentum transfer to move series of closely spaced domain walls.
authors.affiliation: IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA 95120, USA.
authors.forename: Masamitsu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hayashi
authors.forename: Luc
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: Rai
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Moriya
authors.forename: Charles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rettner
authors.forename: Stuart S P
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Parkin