Magnetic anisotropy engineering in in-plane magnetized ultrathin ferromagnetic films (invited)

Abstract

We have studied the effect of depositing submonolayer quantities of Cu onto the CO exposed Co/Cu(110) system at room temperature using the magneto-optic Kerr effect. Cu overlayers are found to completely reverse the in-plane 90° easy axis switch caused by the CO adsorption, for all Co thicknesses studied up to 40 ML. The Cu reverses the sign of the effective in-plane uniaxial anisotropy KUeff thereby switching the easy axis from the [1-10] to the [001] direction. Two modes of switching are observed depending on the magnitude of the cubic magnetocrystalline anisotropy constant K1 which is in turn dependent on the thickness of the Co films. For sufficiently thick Co films (dCo>15 ML), the easy axis is found to shift gradually from the [1-10] to the [001] direction due to the competition between the cubic and effective uniaxial anisotropy contributions. Therefore, we are able to controllably engineer the direction of the easy axis in this system as a function of Cu overlayer thickness. For thin Co films (dCu<15 ML) K1 tends to zero as revealed by BLS measurements of Hillebrands et al. and the easy axis switch is abrupt. We have engineered an experimental realization of an isotropic two-dimensional XY magnet by depositing submonolayer coverages of Cu onto a CO exposed 5 ML Co/Cu(110) film with a zero cubic anisotropy component K1 at room temperature. For a Cu coverage of 1.02 ML, the uniaxial anisotropy component vanishes also, and we observe a corresponding loss of ferromagnetic order at remanence. Further Cu deposition restores the uniaxial anisotropy and the magnetic order. Therefore we have directly observed the stabilization of ferromagnetic order by magnetic anisotropy in an ultrathin magnetic film, as theoretically predicted.