Jamming Behavior of Domain Walls in an Antiferromagnetic Film*

Over the last few years, attempts have been made to unify many aspects of the freezing behavior of glasses, granular materials, gels, supercooled liquids, etc. into a general conceptual framework of what is called jamming behavior. This occurs when particles reach packing densities high enough that their motions become highly restricted. A general phase diagram has been proposed onto which various materials systems, e.g glasses or granular materials, can be mapped. We will discuss some recent applications of resonant and non-resonant soft X-ray Grazing Incidence Scattering to mesoscopic science, for example the study of magnetic domain wall fluctuations in thin films. For these studies, we use resonant magnetic x-ray scattering with a coherent photon beam and the technique of X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy. find that at the ordering temperature the domains of an antiferromagnetic system, namely Dysprosium metal, behave very much also like a jammed system and their associated fluctuations exhibit behavior which exhibit some of the universal characteristics of jammed systems, such as non-exponential relaxation and Vogel-Fulcher type freezing.\\[4pt] Work done in collaboration with San-Wen Chen (UCSD), Hongyu Guo (UCSD), Keoki Seu (ALS/LBL), Karine Dumesnil (Institute Jean Lamour, Universite de Lorraine, Nancy, France) and Sujoy Roy (ALS/LBL).