Reduction in magnetic coercivity of Co nanomagnets by Fe alloying

Hung-Hsiang Yang; Chuan-Che Hsu; Kanta Asakawa; Wen-Chin Lin; Yukio Hasegawa

doi:10.1039/d1nr04862g

Reduction in magnetic coercivity of Co nanomagnets by Fe alloying

Nanoscale. 2021 Oct 14;13(39):16719-16725. doi: 10.1039/d1nr04862g.

Authors

Hung-Hsiang Yang^{1

2}, Chuan-Che Hsu³, Kanta Asakawa^{1

4}, Wen-Chin Lin³, Yukio Hasegawa¹

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Solid State Physics, the University of Tokyo, 5-1-5, Kashiwa-no-ha, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8581, Japan. hung-hsiang.yang@kit.edu.
² Physical Institute, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany.
³ Department of Physics, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, 116, Taiwan.
⁴ Department of Applied Physics, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Koganei, Tokyo 184-8588, Japan.

PMID: 34596197
DOI: 10.1039/d1nr04862g

Abstract

We measured the magnetic hysteresis and coercivity of individual Co and Co_0.8Fe_0.2 bilayer nano-sized island structures formed on Cu (111) substrate using spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy. From the hysteresis taken on various sizes of islands, we found that the alloyed islands are ferromagnetic with out-of-plane magnetic anisotropy, same as the pure islands. Coercivity of the alloy islands, which is dependent on their size, was significantly reduced to ≈40% of that of the pure islands. Based on the Stoner-Wohlfarth model, we evaluated the amount of magnetic anisotropic energy and anisotropy constant for both pure and alloy islands. Since tunneling spectra taken on the alloy islands show upward shifts of the valence electronic states as compared to the pure ones, fewer electrons populated in the valence band of the alloy islands are presumably responsible for the reduction in the magnetic anisotropic energy.