Electron interaction with domain walls in antiferromagnetically coupled multilayers

¹ Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada, C-III Universidad Autónoma de Madrid - Madrid, Spain
² CMIT, University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA
³ Laboratorium voor vaste Stofffysica en Magnetisme, K.U. Leuven B-3001 Leuven, Belgium
⁴ Institute of Electrical Engineering-SAS - 84239 Bratislava, Slovakia
⁵ Max-Planck-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik - Weinberg 2, 06120 Halle, Germany

Received: 2 May 2003
Accepted: 4 July 2003

Abstract

For antiferromagnetically coupled multilayers the low-field contribution to the resistivity , which is caused by the domain walls, is strongly enhanced at low temperatures. The low-temperature resistivity varies according to a power law, with the exponent –1. This behavior cannot be explained assuming ballistic electron transport through the domain walls. It is necessary to invoke the suppression of anti-localization effects (positive quantum correction to conductivity) by the non-uniform gauge fields caused by the domain walls.