Exchange energies in CoFeB/Ru/CoFeB Synthetic Antiferromagnets

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to quantify exchange interactions in CoFeB/Ru/CoFeB synthetic antiferromagnets, revealing detailed magnetic parameters and challenging previous assumptions about interlayer exchange values.

Contribution

It introduces a reliable procedure combining experiments and micromagnetic simulations to measure exchange stiffness and interlayer coupling in synthetic antiferromagnets.

Findings

Exchange stiffness is 16 ± 2 pJ/m, independent of CoFeB thickness.

Interlayer exchange coupling ranges from -1.7 to -1.3 mJ/m$^2$ for layers up to 40 nm.

The method suggests revisiting tabulated values of exchange coupling in thick synthetic antiferromagnets.

Abstract

The interlayer exchange coupling confers specific properties to Synthetic Antiferromagnets that make them suitable for several applications of spintronics. The efficient use of this magnetic configuration requires an in-depth understanding of the magnetic properties and their correlation with the material structure. Here we establish a reliable procedure to quantify the interlayer exchange coupling and the intralayer exchange stiffness in synthetic antiferromagnets; we apply it to the ultrasmooth and amorphous Co$_{40}$Fe$_{40}$B$_{20}$ (5-40 nm)/Ru/ Co$_{40}$Fe$_{40}$B$_{20}$ material platform. The complex interplay between the two exchange interactions results in a gradient of the magnetization orientation across the thickness of the stack which alters the hysteresis and the spin wave eigenmodes of the stack in a non trivial way. We measured the field-dependence of the frequencies of the first four spin waves confined within the thickness of the stack. We modeled these frequencies and the corresponding thickness profiles of these spin waves using micromagnetic simulations. The comparison with the experimental results allows to deduce the magnetic parameters that best account for the sample behavior. The exchange stiffness is established to be 16 $\pm$ 2 pJ/m, independently of the Co$_{40}$Fe$_{40}$B$_{20}$ thickness. The interlayer exchange coupling starts from -1.7 mJ/m$^2$ for the thinnest layers and it can be maintained above -1.3 mJ/m$^2$ for CoFeB layers as thick as 40 nm. The comparison of our method with earlier characterizations using the sole saturation fields argues for a need to revisit the tabulated values of interlayer exchange coupling in thick synthetic antiferromagnets.