JAP accepted: Transversal Magnetic Anisotropy in Nanoscale PdNi-Strips

Right at the start the new year 2013 brings the pleasant news that our manuscript "Transversal Magnetic Anisotropy in Nanoscale PdNi-Strips" has found its way into Journal of Applied Physics. The background of this work is - once again - spin injection and spin-dependent transport in carbon nanotubes. (To be more precise, the manuscript resulted from our ongoing SFB 689 project.) Control of the contact magnetization is the first step for all the experiments. Some time ago we picked Pd_0.3Ni_0.7 as contact material since the palladium generates only a low resistance between nanotube and its leads. The behaviour of the contact strips fabricated from this alloy turned out to be rather complex, though, and this manuscript summarizes our results on their magnetic properties.
Three methods are used to obtain data - SQUID magnetization measurements of a large ensemble of lithographically identical strips, anisotropic magnetoresistance measurements of single strips, and magnetic force microscopy of the resulting domain pattern. All measurements are consistent with the rather non-intuitive result that the magnetically easy axis is perpendicular to the geometrically long strip axis. We can explain this by maneto-elastic coupling, i.e., stress imprinted during fabrication of the strips leads to preferential alignment of the magnetic moments orthogonal to the strip direction.

"Transversal Magnetic Anisotropy in Nanoscale PdNi-Strips"
D. Steininger, A. K. Hüttel, M. Ziola, M. Kiessling, M. Sperl, G. Bayreuther, and Ch. Strunk
Journal of Applied Physics 113, 034303 (2013); arXiv:1208.2163 (PDF[*])
[*] Copyright American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics.