Microwave-assisted switching in CoCrPt granular medium under continuous microwave fields

Abstract

We have fabricated a device for microwave-assisted switching (MAS) experiments with perpendicularly magnetized CoCrPt-SiO2 granular film with anisotropy field Hk = 18.8 kOe. The device was carefully designed to be able to apply a microwave field of 0.95 kOe in amplitude continuously, allowing direct evaluation of microwave-assisted switching properties of the medium without any assumptions about time-dependent switching behavior. The coercivity of CoCrPt-SiO2 medium linearly decreases with increasing microwave frequency, and the maximum coercivity reduction ratio reaches 80% for hrf = 0.95 kOe at frf = 25 GHz after subtracting the effect of temperature rise due to microwave field application. The linear slope of coercivity against the frequency becomes steeper with increasing microwave field amplitude, which is a unique frequency and amplitude dependencies in granular media. Correlation length obtained by X-ray magnetic circular dichroism microscopy measurement decreases by applying a microwave field with higher frequency, suggesting that the magnetic clustering dimensions of the medium possibly depend on microwave frequency during microwave-assisted switching.