Bursty magnetic friction between polycrystalline thin films with domain walls

Abstract

Two magnets in relative motion interact through their dipolar fields, making individual magnetic moments dynamically adapt to the changes in the energy landscape and bringing about collective magnetization dynamics. Some of the energy of the system is irrevocably lost through various coupling mechanisms between the spin degrees of freedom and those of the underlying lattice, resulting in magnetic friction. In this work, we use micromagnetic simulations to study magnetic friction in a system of two thin ferromagnetic films containing quenched disorder mimicking a polycrystalline structure. We observe bursts of magnetic activity resulting from repeated domain wall pinning due to the disorder and subsequent depinning triggered by the dipolar interaction between the moving films. These domain wall jumps result in strong energy dissipation peaks. We study how the properties of the polycrystalline structure such as grain size and strength of the disorder, along with the driving velocity and the width of the films, affect the magnetization dynamics, average energy dissipation, and the statistical properties of the energy dissipation bursts.