Seed influence on the ferromagnetic resonance response of Co/Ni multilayers

Abstract

The effect of Pd and Ru seed layers on the magnetic properties of [Co/Ni]N multilayers with varying number of bilayer repeats N is investigated using vector network analyzer ferromagnetic resonance. The effective anisotropy field HKeff is found to increase with N for Ru seed, but decreases for Pd until N = 15. As N is increased beyond 15, HKeff decreases for both seeds. In contrast, the damping parameter α decreases with N regardless of the seed, showing a 1/N dependence. Taking spin pumping into account, the intrinsic damping α0 for both Pd and Ru seeds reduce to α0 ≈ 0.01. These results demonstrate that there can be a strong influence of the seed/Co interface on anisotropy, especially for sufficiently low N, but not necessarily on α0.