Rotating vortex dipoles in ferromagnets

Vortex-antivortex pairs are localized excitations and have been found to be spontaneously created in magnetic elements. In the case that the vortex and the antivortex have opposite polarities the pair has a nonzero topological charge, and it behaves as a rotating vortex dipole. We find theoretically, and confirm numerically, the form of the energy as a function of the angular momentum of the system and the associated rotation frequencies. We discuss the process of annihilation of the pair which changes the topological charge of the system by unity while its energy is monotonically decreasing. Such a change in the topological charge affects profoundly the dynamics in the magnetic system. We finally discuss the connection of our results with Bloch Points (BP) and the implications for BP dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Compliant Air Skates, An Experiment

There is currently a gap in the market of train levitation systems: wheeled trains and MagLev trains exist, but none utilize the low friction and high efficiency aspect of trains levitated by air skates. An air skate, is an air bearing that uses a pressure difference along its annular body to create a thin flow of air which is strong enough to levitate the weight of the skate. We have designed a compliant air skate that can glide over 0.04[in] defects in surfaces without touching down. After having made compliant skirts out of fiberglass and silicone, our setup of three air skates was easily capable of levitating 300[lb] while maintaining 3[psi] evenly split at the skates with an equivalent air flowrate of 3 [ft^3/min]

Out-of-surface vortices in spherical shells

The interplay of topological defects with curvature is studied for out-of-surface magnetic vortices in thin spherical nanoshells. In the case of easy-surface Heisenberg magnet it is shown that the curvature of the underlying surface leads to a coupling between the localized out-of-surface component of the vortex with its delocalized in-surface structure, i.e. polarity-chirality coupling.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

The Formation and Coarsening of the Concertina Pattern

The concertina is a magnetization pattern in elongated thin-film elements of a soft material. It is a ubiquitous domain pattern that occurs in the process of magnetization reversal in direction of the long axis of the small element. Van den Berg argued that this pattern grows out of the flux closure domains as the external field is reduced. Based on experimental observations and theory, we argue that in sufficiently elongated thin-film elements, the concertina pattern rather bifurcates from an oscillatory buckling mode. Using a reduced model derived by asymptotic analysis and investigated by numerical simulation, we quantitatively predict the average period of the concertina pattern and qualitatively predict its hysteresis. In particular, we argue that the experimentally observed coarsening of the concertina pattern is due to secondary bifurcations related to an Eckhaus instability. We also link the concertina pattern to the magnetization ripple and discuss the effect of a weak (crystalline or induced) anisotropy

Vortex Polarity Switching in Magnets with Surface Anisotropy

Vortex core reversal in magnetic particle is essentially influenced by a surface anisotropy. Under the action of a perpendicular static magnetic field the vortex core undergoes a shape deformationof pillow- or barrel-shaped type, depending on the type of the surface anisotropy. This deformation plays a key point in the switching mechanism: We predict that the vortex polarity switching is accompanied (i) by a linear singularity in case of Heisenberg magnet with bulk anisotropy only and (ii) by a point singularities in case of surface anisotropy or exchange anisotropy. We study in details the switching process using spin-lattice simulations and propose a simple analytical description using a wired core model, which provides an adequate description of the Bloch point statics, its dynamics and the Bloch point mediated switching process. Our analytical predictions are confirmed by spin-lattice simulations for Heisenberg magnet and micromagnetic simulations for nanomagnet with account of a dipolar interaction.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure

Quantitative Fault Injection Analysis

Active fault injection is a credible threat to real-world digital systems computing on sensitive data. Arguing about security in the presence of faults is non-trivial, and state-of-the-art criteria are overly conservative and lack the ability of fine-grained comparison. However, comparing two alternative implementations for their security is required to find a satisfying compromise between security and performance. In addition, the comparison of alternative fault scenarios can help optimize the implementation of effective countermeasures. In this work, we use quantitative information flow analysis to establish a vulnerability metric for hardware circuits under fault injection that measures the severity of an attack in terms of information leakage. Potential use cases range from comparing implementations with respect to their vulnerability to specific fault scenarios to optimizing countermeasures. We automate the computation of our metric by integrating it into a state-of-the-art evaluation tool for physical attacks and provide new insights into the security under an active fault attacker

Magnetization structure of a Bloch point singularity

Switching of magnetic vortex cores involves a topological transition characterized by the presence of a magnetization singularity, a point where the magnetization vanishes (Bloch point). We analytically derive the shape of the Bloch point that is an extremum of the free energy with exchange, dipole and the Landau terms for the determination of the local value of the magnetization modulus.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Quenched Slonczewski-Windmill in Spin-Torque Vortex-Oscillators

We present a combined analytical and numerical study on double-vortex spin-torque nano-oscillators and describe a mechanism that suppresses the windmill modes. The magnetization dynamics is dominated by the gyrotropic precession of the vortex in one of the ferromagnetic layers. In the other layer the vortex gyration is strongly damped. The dominating layer for the magnetization dynamics is determined by the current polarity. Measurements on Fe/Ag/Fe nano-pillars support these findings. The results open up a new perspective for building high quality-factor spin-torque oscillators operating at selectable, well-separated frequency bands

Combined Threshold Implementation

Physical security is an important aspect of devices for which an adversary can manipulate the physical execution environment. Recently, more and more attention has been directed towards a security model that combines the capabilities of passive and active physical attacks, i.e., an adversary that performs fault-injection and side-channel analysis at the same time. Implementing countermeasures against such a powerful adversary is not only costly but also requires the skillful combination of masking and redundancy to counteract all reciprocal effects. In this work, we propose a new methodology to generate combined-secure circuits. We show how to transform TI-like constructions to resist any adversary with the capability to tamper with internal gates and probe internal wires. For the resulting protection scheme, we can prove the combined security in a well-established theoretical security model. Since the transformation preserves the advantages of TI-like structures, the resulting circuits prove to be more efficient in the number of required bits of randomness (up to 100%), the latency in clock cycles (up to 40%), and even the area for pipelined designs (up to 40%) than the state of the art for an adversary restricted to manipulating a single gate and probing a single wire