Fabrication and Characterization of Patterned Exchange-Coupled Trilayers

In 1998 Demokritov et al. succeeded in altering the coupling of exchange coupled Fe/Cr/Fe-trilayers from ferro- to antiferromagntic for the first time by using ion irradiation. Since then, ion irradiation has been used as an advanced technique for magnetic patterning of antiferromagnetically coupled trilayers. In this work patterning by means of ion implantation was applied on exchangecoupled Co90Fe10-trilayers by using (Eirr = 80 keV) Co+-Ions. For that purpose a transition towards appropriate ferromagnetic properties was achieved with an ion-fluence of F = 5 · 1015 Co+=cm2. Stripe patterns fabricated by this techinique were investigated and compared to conventionally patterned (by means of reactive plasma etching) stripes. By using Kerr-microscopy domain structure and the shape of the magnetization reversal was studied. At the boundary of implanted elements edge curling walls were observed (field orientation perpendicular to the stripes) which did not occur in etched samples. Observed differences in the switching behavior could primarily be explained with changes of the magnetic material properties (e.g. anisotropy and saturation magnetization) due to the ion irradiation. Implanted 2 μm wide stripes showed a collective switching with quasi-domains during the magnetic reversal. In this process interactions of the transversal magnetization component with the adjacent non-irradiated antiferromagnetically coupled trilayers were observed. It was found that this transversal component governs the intensity of the collective switching behavior, via extensions of an intermediate domain wall which was simulated micromagnetically in this work. The results for the domain wall widths which were calculated for different anisotropy directions provide a comprehensive picture together with the Kerr-microscopy analysis.