Spatially controlled manipulation of damping in ferromagnetic thin films

The control of dynamic magnetic properties in ferromagnetic thin films is of significant importance for applications in spin electronics. We demonstrate the use of low fluence Ni-ion irradiation to locally and solely tailor the magnetic damping parameter e in ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic Ni81Fe19/IrMn/Ni81Fe19 sandwich structures. The overall relaxation time then depends on the relative fraction of the phases with different e , which thereby can be controlled without changing the precessional frequency. The superposition of alpha is confirmed by modeling of the dynamic response. The demonstrated path of film engineering by local ion irradiation [J. Fassbender, J. McCord, JMMM 320 (2008) 579] provides an additional degree of freedom for the local tailoring of dynamic magnetic properties of soft-magnetic thin films.