Universality of stripe domain width change by an in-plane magnetic field

Abstract We establish a model for a stripe domain pattern width change under hard-axis magnetic fields in a perpendicularly magnetized system with Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction. With the presence of hard-axis magnetic fields, tilted magnetizations in domains modulate an exchange interaction, a perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and a dipole–dipole interaction into specific forms, which are the main competing interactions to determine the specific form of the stripe domain. In addition, we found that the stripe domain pattern change under a hard-axis perturbation can be analyzed by only considering the amount of magnetization tilting from the initial easy-axis. The proposed model was used to draw a single universal curve for stripe width change as a function of the hard-axis magnetic fields.