We have fabricated ferromagnet-insulator-ferromagnet tunnel junctions with Co and NiFe electrodes, where the Co electrodes are pinned with a hard magnetic Co81Pt19 alloy layer. This approach gives a coercivity of about 300 Oe for the Co layer, while that of the NiFe is about 80 Oe, so we obtain antiparallel magnetization over a wide field range. The Al2O3 tunneling barrier layers were formed by in situ plasma oxidation of elemental Al layers with thicknesses from 10 to 25 Å. For the junctions, we find room temperature magnetoresistance ratios as high as 13% and nonlinear current–voltage curves that are well fit by the Simmons tunneling theory. Depth profiling x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy of oxidized Al barrier layers on Co underlayers reveals a stoichiometry of nearly Al2O3.
The magnetic permeability frequency spectrum is one of the most critical properties for the operation of high frequency magnetic devices in the gigahertz regime. Permeability is fairly constant up to the ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) frequency, at which point the relative permeability drops to unity. Extending FMR to higher frequencies is thus imperative for developing GHz-range magnetic devices. The simulation and experimental investigations presented in this paper demonstrate how stacking layers to form a laminated film increases the FMR frequency by allowing flux closure between layers along the induced easy-axis direction. This flux closure reduces the demagnetization factor along the easy-axis direction by two orders of magnitude. This effect, however, is only observable in patterned films where the shape anisotropy is enough to result in variation of the FMR frequency. Experiments using patterned magnetic cores were performed to illustrate this effect. Through detailed investigation of the permeability spectra of both single layer and laminated CoTaZr magnetic films patterned into 500 μm × L films (where L ranged from 200 μm to 1000 μm), the FMR frequency was extracted and proven to increase as a result of lamination. The degree to which the frequency is boosted by lamination increases exponentially as the length of the film is decreased. Through a combination of lamination and shape demagnetization, the effective anisotropy, which directly relates to FMR frequency, was shown to increase by about 100%.
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