Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme
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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus
MA 26: Exchange Bias
MA 26.10: Talk
Thursday, March 29, 2007, 17:30–17:45, H10
Tuning exchange bias in thin Fe/CoO bilayers by introducing a Cr dusting layer — •Yuriy Yanson1, Florin Radu2, Kurt Westerholt1, and Hartmut Zabel1 — 1Department of Physics, Ruhr-University Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany — 2BESSY GmbH, Albert-Einstein-Str. 15, 12489 Berlin, Germany
We investigated the change of the hysteresis loop shift and the coercive field of exchange biased Fe/CoO bilayers as a function of the Cr dusting layer thickness at the interface. Cr layers were grown at room temperature to ensure layer-by-layer growth. Magnetic properties of the system were measured using MOKE and SQUID. Above the Cr-thickness of one monolayer the coercive field and the exchange bias field decay exponentially as expected from the distance dependence of the exchange interaction. For submonolayer Cr-thickness, however, significant deviations of the behavior of the coercive field and the exchange bias field were observed. For that thickness range coercivity decays much more rapidly than the exchange bias field. This suggests that Cr atoms prefer to cover defect locations on the CoO surface and neutralize them. These defects are responsible for domain wall pinning and determine the coercivity. We show that by choosing certain growth temperatures and Cr dusting layer thicknesses one can tune the magnetic properties of the exchange biased system by setting the coercive field and the exchange bias field independently.