Effects of magnetostatic coupling on stripe domain structures in magnetic multilayers with perpendicular anisotropy

Abstract

We investigate the effects of magnetostatic interlayer coupling on the formation of magnetic domains in exchange-coupled ferromagnetic films exhibiting perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Using simple models for the stripe domain structures we investigate how the magnetostatic interlayer interaction affects the domain size. For antiferromagnetically exchange-coupled multilayers, we show that there is a domain overlap due to the magnetostatic interaction which exists only above a critical thickness and below a critical separation between the ferromagnetic films where it is scaled inversely proportional to the antiferromagnetic exchange coupling constant. We show that the magnetostatic coupling is responsible for the periodic “tiger tail” domain structure observed experimentally and demonstrate the dependence of the period of this structure on the interlayer exchange coupling.