High-speed antiferromagnetic domain walls driven by coherent spin waves
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
University of Arizona
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3.
University of California, Riverside
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4.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
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5.
Stanford University
Abstract
The ability to rapidly manipulate domain walls in magnetic materials is key to developing novel high-speed spintronic memory and computing devices. Antiferromagnetic materials present a particularly promising platform due to their robustness against stray fields and their potential for exceptional domain wall velocities. Among various proposed driving mechanisms, coherent spin waves could potentially propel antiferromagnetic domain walls to the magnon group velocity while minimizing dissipation from Joule heating. However, experimental realization has remained elusive due to the dual challenges of generating coherent antiferromagnetic spin waves near isolated mobile antiferromagnetic domain walls and simultaneously measuring high-speed domain wall dynamics. Here we experimentally realize an approach where ultrafast laser pulses generate coherent spin waves that drive antiferromagnetic domain walls and develop a technique to directly map the spatiotemporal domain wall dynamics. Using the room-temperature antiferromagnetic insulator Sr2Cu3O4Cl2, we observe antiferromagnetic domain wall motion with record-high velocities up to ~50 km s−1. Remarkably, the direction of domain wall propagation is controllable through both the pump laser helicity and the sign of the domain wall winding number. This bidirectional control can be theoretically explained, and numerically reproduced, by the domain wall dynamics induced by coherent spin waves of the in-plane magnon mode—a phenomenon unique to magnets with an easy-plane anisotropy. Our work uncovers a novel domain wall propulsion mechanism that is generalizable to a wide range of antiferromagnetic materials, unlocking new opportunities for ultrafast coherent antiferromagnetic spintronics.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge helpful conversations with Jonathan Curtis and Eugene Demler. D.H. acknowledges support for time-resolved SHG measurements from a Brown Investigator Award, a program of the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, as well as the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), an NSF Physics Frontiers Center (PHY-2317110). D.H. acknowledges support for instrumentation from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. K.L.S. acknowledges a Caltech Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship. R.C. and H.Z. were supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant No. FA9550-19-1-0307. The work at Stanford and SLAC (crystal growth and sample characterization) was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515.
Data Availability
The data that support the findings in this study are available in the main text and the supplementary information. Source data are provided with this paper.
Supplemental Material
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s41467-025-64803-2.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Describes
- Journal Article: https://rdcu.be/ePZ2f (ReadCube)
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2511.07531 (arXiv)
Funding
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2317110
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- California Institute of Technology
- Caltech Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship -
- United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- FA9550-19-1-0307
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-AC02-76SF00515
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-09-26
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published