The effect of growth sequence on magnetization damping in Ta/CoFeB/MgO structures

Abstract

Magnetization damping is a key parameter to control the critical current and the switching speed in magnetic random access memory, and here we report the effect of the growth sequence on the magnetic dynamics properties of perpendicularly magnetized Ta/CoFeB/MgO structures. Ultrathin CoFeB films have been grown between Ta and MgO but with different stack sequences, i.e. substrate/Ta/CoFeB/MgO/Ta and substrate/Ta/MgO/CoFeB/Ta. The magnetization dynamics induced by femtosecond laser was investigated by using all-optical pump-probe measurements. We found that the Gilbert damping constant was modulated by reversing stack structures, which offers the potential to tune the damping parameter by the growth sequence. The Gilbert damping constant was enhanced from 0.017 for substrate/Ta/CoFeB/MgO/Ta to 0.027 for substrate/Ta/MgO/CoFeB/Ta. We believe that this enhancement originates from the increase of intermixing at the CoFeB/Ta when the Ta atom layer was grown after the CoFeB layer.