Surface magnetization processes in soft magnetic nanowires

N. Lupu, M. Lostun, and H. Chiriac Citation: J. Appl. Phys. 107, 09E315 (2010); doi: 10.1063/1.3360209 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3360209 View Table of Contents: http://jap.aip.org/resource/1/JAPIAU/v107/i9 Published by the American Institute of Physics.

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JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS 107, 09E315 2010

Surface magnetization processes in soft magnetic nanowires

N. Lupu,1,a M. Lostun,1,2 and H. Chiriac1
1 2

National Institute of Research and Development for Technical Physics, Iasi, Romania Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Faculty of Physics, Iasi, Romania

Presented 21 January 2010; received 31 October 2009; accepted 18 February 2010; published online 11 May 2010 The surface magnetization processes taking place in simple permalloy Py and FeGa nanowires, Py/Cu, CoFeB/Cu, CoNiP/Cu, FeGa/Py, and FeGa/CoFeB multilayered nanowires have been studied by magneto-optical Kerr effect MOKE magnetometry. The results indicate a strong correlation between the direction of the anisotropy axis relative to the direction of the applied eld and the plane of incidence of the laser spot, as well as the effect of dipolar interactions between the nanowires or between the ferromagnetic layers on the magnetization reversal. The larger laser spots are inducing more noise in the MOKE hysteresis loops because of the dimensional imperfections along the nanowires. 2010 American Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3360209
I. INTRODUCTION

Recently, magnetic nanowires were extensively studied because of their specic properties and multiple potential applications.13 A special emphasis is laid on the nanowires prepared by electrochemical deposition in the nanopores of different templates, due to the efciency of this preparation method.2,3 One of the most used soft magnetic materials for nanowires, either single or multilayered, is permalloy Py .2 In combination with nonmagnetic Cu, it offers one of the best solutions for spin devices. Among other soft magnetic materials, the amorphous nanowires4,5 offer a viable alternative to Py. Due to the lack of magnetocrystalline anisotropy, the softness of amorphous nanowires is enhanced. Very recently, FeGa nanowires as well as combinations with Py or CoFeB amorphous alloys have been fabricated for the rst time by using electrodeposition into nanoporous anodic alumina membranes.68 Such nanowires have a strong potential to be used in sensors for different medical applications, mainly because of their magnetoelastic properties they can mimic different cilia from the human body.6 Due to their small size, the magnetic properties of the nanowires are difcult to measure with conventional magnetometers, mainly when it comes to single nanowires. A more powerful tool used widely in the recent years to characterize the magnetic nanowires, including the domain walls movement, spin dynamics or magnetic domain imaging, is the magneto-optical Kerr effect MOKE magnetometry.9 Because of the relative high penetration depth about 30 nm or more, depending on the laser power , comparable with the nanowires thickness/diameter, MOKE magnetometry is a suitable method to characterize both the surface and volume magnetization reversal processes. Here, we present comparatively our results on the surface magnetization processes taking place in different soft magnetic nanowires: simple permalloy Py Ni80Fe20 = Py and FeGa nanowires, Py/Cu, CoFeB/Cu and CoNiP/Cu,
a

FeGa/Py, and FeGa/CoFeB multilayered nanowires, where CoFeB and CoNiP are showing amorphous structures and FeGa is a magnetostrictive alloy.

II. EXPERIMENT

Electronic mail: nicole@phys-iasi.ro.

All nanowires have been prepared by electrodeposition into the alumina templates with nanopores diameters ranging from 35 nm to 300 nm, respectively, using single bath complex solutions of the corresponding salts.4,7,8,10 The following nominal compositions have been used to prepare simple or multilayered nanowires: Ni80Fe20 = Py, Co75Fe10B15 = CoFeB, Co, Ni 80P20 = CoNiP, and Fe80Ga20 = FeGa. The nanowires have been released from the template10 using a concentrate solution of NaOH, followed by nal cleaning by ultrasonication. The surface magnetic loops have been measured by means of longitudinal MOKE effect the rotation of the plane of polarization is proportional with the magnetization component parallel with the plane of incidence , using a nanoMOKE II magnetometer, produced by Durham Magneto Optics, Ltd. A polarized light generated by a HeNe laser was reected from the nanowire to the detector. The diameter of the light beam varied between 2 and 10 m. For the 2 m laser spot the maximum magnetic eld is created by a quadrupole magnet and can reach a maximum value of about 150 Oe, whereas for the 10 m laser spot the maximum obtained eld with an electromagnet is 5000 Oe. The plane of incidence was parallel with the nanowires long axis. Nanowires with lengths of 12 cm have been studied. The experiments were carried out on the central part of a single nanowire, at room temperature. Additionally, measurements on 2, 3, and 4 nanowires placed parallel in the same plane of the sample stage have been done to estimate the interaction between nanowires. External magnetic eld was applied parallel to both the nanowires and the plane of incidence. The hysteresis loops were obtained from the simple and multilayered nanowires by averaging 3000 to 5000 individual loops.
2010 American Institute of Physics

0021-8979/2010/107 9 /09E315/3/$30.00

107, 09E315-1

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09E315-2

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FIG. 1. Surface magnetic hysteresis curves measured by means of MOKE effect for: a Py simple nanowires and b Py/Cu multilayered nanowires.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

FIG. 2. MOKE hysteresis loops for 1, 2, 3, and 4 Py nanowires, placed near each other and parallel with the laser beam incidence plane. The diameter of each nanowire is 120 nm.

The increase in the simple Py nanowires diameter causes rst the decrease in the coercive eld, followed by an increase for larger diameter nanowires due to the depth penetration of the laser spot and the demagnetizing effects Fig. 1 a . The decrease in the coercive eld for the individual Py/Cu multilayered nanowires of 35 nm in diameter compared with the simple Py nanowires is the result of the reduced axial magnetic anisotropy, whereas for larger diameter multilayered nanowires the variation in the coercive eld is inuenced by both the reduced axial magnetic anisotropy and the increase in the circumferential magnetic permeability in the surface layer due to the presence of nonmagnetic Cu layers10 Fig. 1 b . Additionally, the coercive eld decreases for Py/Cu multilayered nanowires with the same diameter once the thickness of the magnetic Py layer increases, while the Cu layer thickness remains unchanged. This behavior is most probably caused by the increased pinning role played by the nonmagnetic Cu layers separating thicker magnetic layers of Py. One can notice the squared hysteresis loops of simple Py nanowires, regardless of their diameter, as well as of multilayered Py 30 /Cu 10 nanowires, associated with a single large Barkhausen jump between two stable remanent magnetic congurations. The situation is different for the multilayered nanowires with the Py layer of 50 nm, in agreement with the ac magnetic measurements reported in Ref. 10. Moreover, the hysteresis curves of all multilayered Py/Cu nanowires presents a number of Barkhausen jumps associated with the number of ferromagnetic sequences Py because each Py layer creates a dipolar eld which inuences the neighboring Py layers.11 The same effect is evidenced when 2, 3, or 4 nanowires of Py are placed near each other, parallel between them and

with the plane of incidence Fig. 2 . In this case, the Barkhausen jumps are correlated perfectly with the number of nanowires measured together. Therefore, each Barkhausen jump is the result of the magnetization reversal in each nanowire. The number of jumps increases with the number of nanowires and the hysteresis loop remains squared. The switching eld increases rst with the number of nanowires, and decreases suddenly for four parallel nanowires. Each nanowire produces a dipolar eld, which affects the neighboring nanowires additional to the external magnetic eld. Thus, a complicated spatial magnetic eld distribution is created, which affects very strongly the response of the whole system12,13 and causes the reduction in the switching eld for four nanowires conguration. The multilayered nanowires containing CoFeB and CoNiP magnetic amorphous layers and non-magnetic Cu layers are behaving in a totally different manner, and show much smaller coercive elds, due to the reduced magnetic anisotropy of the amorphous CoFeB or CoNiP alloys compared with Py Fig. 3 . The larger saturation magnetic elds required for CoFeB/Cu and CoNiP/Cu multilayered nanowires can be explained by the larger circumferential magnetic anisotropy existing in such materials compared with Py layers.14 However, no clear Barkhausen jumps are observed for these multilayered nanowires, most probably because the anisotropy axis is oriented along the nanowires and parallel with the external applied eld, compared with Py/Cu multilayered nanowires for which the anisotropy is oriented perpendicular relative to the long nanowires axis direction, i.e., in the plane of the Py layers.2

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09E315-3

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sional imperfections of the nanowires along their length the high resolution scanning electron microscopy HR-SEM images have shown the existence of a very thin supercial layer of alumina still existing on the surface7,8 , considering that in this case the laser spot was of 10 m and thus a longer part of the nanowires is averaged, compared with simple Py and Py/Cu multilayered nanowires for which a 2 m in diameter laser spot was used.
IV. CONCLUSIONS

FIG. 3. Surface magnetic hysteresis curves for CoFeB/Cu and CoNiP/Cu multilayered nanowires.

Magnetostrictive FeGa alloys are less soft magnetic materials compared with Py but still the coercive eld is reduced and the saturation eld low enough below 0.1 T . The combination with soft magnetic Py or amorphous CoFeB layers is softening the multilayered nanowires, as one can see in Fig. 4, and reduces the switching eld at which the magnetization reversal is achieved. However, the surface hysteresis loops for FeGa-based multilayered nanowires are behaving in an opposite manner compared with their volume hysteresis loops counterparts,7,8 which shows a softer magnetic behavior for FeGa/CoFeB compared with FeGa/Py multilayered nanowires. The reason for such a different behavior might be the local structure of the CoFeB amorphous alloys, which behaves differently at short range order. The small jumps existing in the MOKE hysteresis loops of both FeGa simple nanowires and FeGa/Py or FeGa/CoFeB multilayered nanowires are given the most probably by the dimen-

We have shown that MOKE is a powerful tool for the characterization of magnetic nanowires prepared by electrodeposition technique. The surface hysteresis loops are strongly dependent on the diameter of the nanowires, their composition, the thickness of the layers composing the multilayered nanowires and the number of nanowires measured at once. The results are relevant to understand the intrinsic mechanisms governing the magnetic behavior of magnetic nanowires with different compositions, mainly because the macroscopic methods of measurement are not always relevant for such nanomaterials, and to future design of magnetic multilayer devices using nanowires with various compositions and magnetic characteristics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Support from the PN II Partnerships Programme Contract No. 11-072/2007, NANOBIODET, and Contract No. 12-114/2008, SANAM , and NUCLEU Programme Contract No. 09-43 01 02 is highly acknowledged.
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2 1

FIG. 4. MOKE magnetic hysteresis curves for simple FeGa nanowires and, respectively, FeGa/Py and FeGa/CoFeB multilayered nanowires.

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