High speed domain wall motion in MgO-based magnetic tunnel junctions driven by perpendicular current injection

The ability to efficiently drive fast domain wall (DW) motion will pave the way for revolutionary new electronic devices ranging from DW-MRAMs to spintronic memristors. The majority of domain wall devices use a lateral, current-in-plane configuration in which critical current densities for domain wall motion remain quite high, typically being on the order of 100 MA/cm$^{2}$ with velocities generally limited to about 100 m/s. In this contribution we show that critical current densities can be decreased by up to two orders of magnitude using the current-perpendicular-to-plane geometry. Indeed, we demonstrate that a DW can be propagated back and forth along the free layer of a MgO-based magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) in the absence of an external magnetic field using current densities that are on the order of 5 MA/cm$^{2}$. More notably however, we obtain high domain wall velocities for these low current densities: the MTJ's large resistance variations allow us to carry out time-resolved measurements of the wall motion from which we evidence DW velocities exceeding 500m/s.