Dynamics of magnetic vortices

The canonical conservation laws of linear and angular momentum in the ferromagnetic continuum have been known to be plagued by certain ambiguities which are resolved in this paper by constructing conservation laws as suitable moments of a topological density. The resulting canonical structure is then shown to be analogous to that encountered in the familiar Hall effect and explains the unusual features of the dynamics of magnetic vortices without resorting to a detailed solution of the underlying nonlinear equations. Thus, in the absence of external magnetic fields, a magnetic vortex is shown to be spontaneously pinned around a fixed guiding center. The guiding center would drift in a direction perpendicular to an applied magnetic field gradient, provided that dissipation can be neglected, with a Hall velocity that is calculated explicitly in terms of the initial configuration of the vortex. In the presence of dissipation, the vortex undergoes skew deflection at an angle δ ≠ 90° with respect to the applied field gradient. The angle δ is related to the winding number of the vortex according to the well-known golden rule of bubble dynamics.