Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of Pd-Co alloy films and related multilayers

Abstract

with the easy axis perpendicular to the film plane . The anisotropy is usually considered to originate from the interface between CO and Pd layers or from CO moment which located at the interface. Magneto-strictive efffyt and alloying at the interface were not considered to be the origin ' . However, very few experiments have been done for Pd-Co alloy films and their properties are still not clarified. Furthermore, it has been reported-4 @at PdCo alloys exhibit very large negative magnetostriction up to -2r10 . This suggests that the alloy films are very sensitive to the stress due to the substrate constraint or lattice misfits. The large magnetostriction also suggests that PdCo alloys are very sensitive to the crystal field which may be related to so called interface anisotropy in Pd/Co multilayer films. In this paper, we report that vacuum deposited Pd-Co alloy films exhibits extremely large perpendicular anisotropy. We further report preliminary results for multilayer films'consists of PdCo alloy layers. Pd/Co multilayer films are known to exhibit 1affS)magnetlc