Impurity effects on soliton dynamics in planar ferromagnets

Abstract We investigate numerically the dynamics of solitons in a ferromagnetic spin chain and we show that the sine-Gordon approximation provides only a poor description of the solitary excitations in the presence of impurities. Depending on their energy and the strength of the impurity, solitons can be reflected or transmitted. When they are reflected, they can suffer abrupt changes in velocity, which are associated to the switch from one soliton branch to another. In some cases the scattering by an impurity can excite an internal mode of the soliton, which is able to store some energy and modify the output of the scattering.