Abstract
With the continuing interest in new magnetic materials for sensor devices and data storage applications, the community needs reliable and sensitive tools for the characterization of such materials. Soft X-rays tuned to elemental absorption edges are a depth and element sensitive probe of magnetic structure at the nanoscale, and scattering measurements have the potential to provide 3D magnetic structural information of the material. In this work we develop a methodology in transmission geometry that allows one to probe the spatial distribution of the magnetization along the different layers of magnetic heterostructures. We study the in-plane/out-of-plane transition of magnetic domains in multilayer thin film systems consisting of two layers of NiFe top and bottom, and a 50 repeat Co/Pd multilayer in the centre. The experimental data are analysed by simulating scattering data starting from micromagnetic simulations, and we find that the out of plane domains of the Co/Pd multilayer intrude into the NiFe layers to a greater extent than would be expected from micromagnetic simulations performed using the standard magnetically isotropic input parameters for the NiFe layers.
Highlights
The continuous research interest into magnetism along with the development of new devices has been possible mainly due to both the continuous discovery of new classes of materials and the development of techniques for characterizing such materials
The use of resonant magnetic scattering in transmission geometry[11,12,13] has had relatively little study compared with its reflection counterpart[2,14,15,16,17,18,19,20], especially for the aims of 3D characterization where most effort has been focused on scanning and full field microscopy[21,22,23,24,25,26], recently including its ptychographic variant[27,28,29,30]
We develop a combined experimental-simulation methodology that allows us to analyse transmission mode X-ray resonant magnetic scattering (XRMS) patterns to understand the spatial distribution of the magnetization along the different layers of magnetic heterostructures
Summary
The continuous research interest into magnetism along with the development of new devices has been possible mainly due to both the continuous discovery of new classes of materials and the development of techniques for characterizing such materials. It is generally accepted that NiFe is a magnetically soft material which tends to display in-plane magnetisation, and the first candidate for comparison with the experimental measurements assumed an anisotropy of zero in the NiFe layers, and an anisotropy in the CoPd multilayer set such that the overall anisotropy of the entire sample was equal to the value obtained in the VSM.
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