Switching Between Magnetic Bloch And Neel Domain Walls With Anisotropy Modulations

It has been shown previously that the presence of a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in perpendicularly magnetized thin films stabilizes Neel type domain walls. We demonstrate, using micromagnetic simulations and analytical modeling, that the presence of a uniaxial in plane magnetic anisotropy can also lead to the formation of Neel walls in the absence of a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. It is possible to abruptly switch between Bloch and Neel walls via a small modulation of the in plane, but also the perpendicular, magnetic anisotropy. This opens up a route toward electric field control of the domain wall type with small applied voltages through electric field controlled anisotropies.