AVS 46th International Symposium
    Magnetic Interfaces and Nanostructures Technical Group Wednesday Sessions
       Session MI-WeA

Paper MI-WeA4
Magnetic Stability of Exchange Coupled Magnetic Systems

Wednesday, October 27, 1999, 3:00 pm, Room 618/619

Session: Giant Magnetoresistance
Presenter: A. Inomata, Argonne National Laboratory
Authors: A. Inomata, Argonne National Laboratory
J.S. Jiang, Argonne National Laboratory
C.-Y. You, Argonne National Laboratory
J.E. Pearson, Argonne National Laboratory
S.D. Bader, Argonne National Laboratory
Correspondent: Click to Email
The growing demand for higher density magnetic recording and the development of magnetoelectronic devices require controllable magnetic properties on the nanometer scale.@footnote 1@ The application of interfacial exchange coupling is attractive for this purpose. The exchange bias effect occurring at the interface between a ferromagnet(F) and an antiferromagnet(AF) has been used for GMR heads in high density magnetic recording, and exchange-spring magnets consisting of exchange coupled hard and soft ferromagnetic phases are candidates for the next generation of permanent magnet materials. We present a comparison of the magnetic stability in exchange bias and exchange spring systems. The exchange bias system used is the Fe/Cr "double superlattice" structures constructed as [Fe/Cr]@super AF@/Cr/[Fe/Cr]@super F@ with appropriate Cr thickness representing the F and AF.@footnote 2@ And for the exchange spring system we used SmCo/Fe bilayer structures grown epitaxially on different templates to give uniaxial, biaxial and random in-plane anisotropy.@footnote 3@ The switching field and remanent magnetization of both systems were measured by the magneto-optic Kerr effect during repeated reversal of the soft layer magnetization by field cycling. All samples are stable after 10@super +6@ cycles. The effects of the pinning layer and the interfacial spin configuration will be discussed. Work supported by US-DOE BES-MS Contract No. W-31-109-ENG-38. @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@ S.Gider et al. Science, 281, 797, 1998. @footnote 2@ J.S.Jiang et al. Submitted to Phys.Rev.Lett. @footnote 3@ E.E.Fullerton et al. Phys.Rev.B.58, 12193, 1998.