Thermally assisted reversal of exchange biasing in NiO and FeMn based systems

Abstract

The stability of the exchange bias field Heb has been studied for magnetron sputtered NiO/Ni66Co18Fe16 and Ni66Co18Fe16/FeMn bilayers. A forced antiparallel alignment of the ferromagnetic magnetization to Heb results in a gradual decrease of Heb as a function of time for NiO as well as FeMn based samples. The observed decrease of Heb increases with temperature and is interpreted as a thermally assisted reversal of magnetic domains in the antiferromagnetic layer.