Micromagnetic Behavior of Electrodeposited NiFe/Cu Multilayered Nanowires

By means of vibrating-sample-magnetometry measurements and micromagnetic simulations, we investigated the hysteresis loops of electrodeposited NiFe/Cu multilayered nanowires arrays. There is a detailed comparison between the hysteresis loops of arrays of multilayered nanowires and three-dimensional micromagnetic simulations. Two different structures are studied and compared: (a) conventional multilayered NiFe/Cu nanowires and (b) NiFe/Cu/NiFe trilayers magnetically isolated by a thick Cu layer. The nanowires are fabricated by electrodeposition in the pores of anodic aluminum oxide templates with diameters as small as 35 nm. Micromagnetic simulations are in good agreement with the experimental results, giving us a better insight on the influence of the shape anisotropy, the inter-wire, and the intra-wire magnetostatic coupling on the characteristic parameters of the hysteresis loop of multilayered nanowires arrays. Furthermore, micromagnetic simulations showed that for multilayered nanowires coercivity, values increased rapidly as the number of the ferromagnetic layers for a single nanowire increased up to the number of four layers, whereas coercivity decreased when the number of nanowires composing an array increased.