Regensburg 2004 – scientific programme
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MA: Magnetismus
MA 10: Exchange Bias
MA 10.9: Talk
Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 12:15–12:30, H10
New physics from perpendicular coupled magnetic films — •Olav Hellwig1, Andreas Berger2, Jeffrey B. Kortright3, and Eric E. Fullerton2 — 1BESSY GmbH, Albert Einstein Str. 15, 12489 Berlin, Germany — 2Hitachi San Jose Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120, USA — 3Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Magnetic storage technologies exploit antiferromagnetic (AF) exchange coupling in state of the art media and head designs [1]. Although current devices have the magnetization of the layers within the film plane, in the future there may be advantages in having the magnetization perpendicular to the plane. This is certainly the case for recording media and may apply to other devices as well. Motivated by this, we explored the magnetic properties of a model system of AF-coupled films with perpendicular anisotropy. In this geometry the dipolar fields and the interlayer exchange coupling compete with each other, thus resulting in novel phase transitions and a surprisingly rich array of domain structures not seen with in-plane systems [2,3]. Imaging studies of these domains will be presented with simple energy calculations that explain our observations.
[1] Eric E. Fullerton et al, Appl. Phys. Lett. 77 (2000) 3806
[2] Olav Hellwig et al, Nature Materials 2 (2003) 112
[3] Olav Hellwig et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 (2003) 197203