Dynamics of one-dimensional domain walls interacting with disorder potential

Dynamics of ID perpendicular-anisotropy domain walls in a few monolayer-thin Co films is imaged by polar Kerr microscopy. When domain walls, driven by a square-pulsed magnetic fields, travel through a random disordered potential landscape, they display Gaussian-distributed roughness characteristic of this landscape. Average velocity of the domain wall driven by a constant magnetic field strongly depends on a strain field which modifies (increases) the elastic energy of the wall and reduces the wall velocity. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.