Apparent permeability of ordered magnetically soft nanowire and microwire arrays

Abstract

Arrays of magnetically soft nanowires and microwires have potential sensor applications [1, 2]. We have reported nanowire array manufactured by electrodeposition of permalloy into polycarbonate membranes [3]. In this paper we report permalloy nanowire and microwire arrays produced using alumina and silicon membranes with hexagonally ordered pores with constant pitch. These membranes allow to optimize the nanowire array properties such as coercivity, apparent permeability and amplification factor.Finite element modelling of nanowire arrays is demanding due to the computational complexity. In [4] we calculated apparent permeability and demagnetization factor of single wire and small wire arrays. We have also proposed simplified 2D equivalent model allowing to calculate properties of wire arrays very efficiently [5] and verified the validity of this model by full 3D simulations and also experimentally on arrays of up to 91 permalloy microwires. In this paper we apply this model to manufactured arrays of 3 mm diameter containing 100 000 to 40 million wires with diameters between 180 nm and 2.5 μm and compare simulation results to measurements by SQUID. Figs. 1 and 2 show examples of the measured hysteresis loops with red line showing the slope corresponding to apparent amplitude permeability. The values calculated by FEM using constant permeability model show significant deviations especially at low density arrays. We will show that this difference is caused by the nonlinear shielding effect: the field in the outermost wires is much stronger and thus they are saturated first. Because of that the saturation process propagates fast from the periphery towards inside array which can be shown on non-linear model.  Fig. 1 Hysteresis loop of the array of 180 nm diameter 100 μm long wires with 480 nm pitch. Measured apparent amplitude permeability μa = 45, calculated incremental μai = 8.6.  Fig. 2 Hysteresis loop of the array of 2.5 μm diameter 200 μm long wires with 4.2 μm nominal pitch. Measured apparent amplitude permeability μa = 5.5, calculated incremental μai = 3.8.