Head-to-head domain wall structures in wide permalloy strips

Abstract

We analyze the equilibrium micromagnetic domain wall structures encountered in Permalloy strips of a wide range of thicknesses and widths, with strip widths up to several micrometers. By performing an extensive set of micromagnetic simulations, we show that the equilibrium phase diagram of the domain wall structures exhibits in addition to the previously found structures (symmetric and asymmetric transverse walls, vortex wall) also double vortex and triple vortex domain walls for large enough strip widths and thicknesses. Also several metastable domain wall structures are found for wide and/or thick strips. We discuss the details of the relaxation process from random magnetization initial states towards the stable domain wall structure and show that our results are robust with respect to changes of, e.g., the magnitude of the Gilbert damping constant and details of the initial conditions.