Micromagnetic investigation of the dynamics of magnetization switching induced by a spin polarized current

Abstract

Using micromagnetic modeling, we tested a prediction of single-domain spin-torque theory which switching current density depends only weakly on magnetic cell size. The switching time and current density are strongly affected by the cell size for low spin polarization. Larger samples with a small length-to-width ratio and small spin polarization can exhibit a nonmonotonous dependence of switching time on current. Excitation of incoherent spin waves caused by the circular Oersted field due to the current is responsible for this nonmonotonous dependence. However, the magnetic dynamics recovers a single-domain-like behavior when the spin polarization is high and/or the cell size is small.