PNR determination of magnetic structure in Co/Pd perpendicular exchange spring thin films

Atomic interface engineering has allowed magnetic exchange spring multilayers to be created which are both stable against thermally activated magnetisation reversal, and can be switched using the moderate fields/currents available in technologically realisable devices. These requirements are key to the creation of new forms of spintronic memory with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy including STT-MRAM (recently commercialized by Samsung and others) and the rapidly developing SOT-MRAM. Here we propose to address two outstanding scientific questions associated with this class of materials – (i) that of understanding the effect of high temperature annealing (where literature is extremely sparse) which is essential for chip integration processing (>300°C) and (ii) to determine the magnet exchange spring interaction created by combining Co/Pd multilayers with high/low magnetic anisotropy.