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Spatio-temporal patterns in ultra-slow domain wall creep dynamics
Manipulation and storage of information in magnetic, ferroic and spintronic materials heavily rests on the possibility to create domains and, especially, to govern their boundaries. The control of domain wall dynamics is of crucial importance and hinges on our ability to describe its basic nature ; so much that the current technological advance is partially inhibited by a poor understanding of thermal effects. In this work we show that at finite temperature and in presence of a small drive the motion of the wall occurs via activation of events forming large correlated avalanches, similarly to the clusters of aftershocks that follows an earthquake. The rate of such events decays exponentially with their size, resulting -even at room temperature- in ultra-slow domain wall motion. This favors the stability of domains, but at the same time presents a challenge for the domain wall manipulation engineering.