Determination of the spin torque non-adiabaticity in perpendicularly magnetized nanowires

Novel nanofabrication methods and the discovery of an efficient manipulation of local magnetization based on spin polarized currents has generated a tremendous interest in the field of spintronics. The search for materials allowing for fast domain wall dynamics requires fundamental research into the effects involved (Oersted fields, adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin torque, Joule heating) and possibilities for a quantitative comparison. Theoretical descriptions reveal a material and geometry dependence of the non-adiabaticity factor β, which governs the domain wall velocity. Here, we present two independent approaches for determining β: (i) measuring the dependence of the dwell times for which a domain wall stays in a metastable pinning state on the injected current and (ii) the current-field equivalence approach. The comparison of the deduced β values highlights the problems of using one-dimensional models to describe two-dimensional dynamics and allows us to ascertain the reliability, robustness and limits of the approaches used.