Advanced Functional Materials, Vol.24, No.23, 3508-3514, 2014
Beam-Induced Fe Nanopillars as Tunable Domain-Wall Pinning Sites
Focused-electron-beam-induced deposition (FEBID) is employed to create freestanding magnetic nanostructures. By growing Fe nanopillars on top of a perpendicular magnetic domain wall (DW) conduit, pinning of the DWs is observed due to the stray fields emanating from the nanopillar. Furthermore, a different DW pinning behavior is observed between the up and down magnetic states of the pillar, allowing to deduce the switching fields of the pillar in a novel way. The implications of these results are two-fold: not only can 3-dimensional nano-objects be used to control DW motion in applications, it is also proposed that DW motion is a unique tool to probe the magnetic properties of nano-objects.
Keywords:beam induced deposition;magnetic nanostructures;magnetic domain walls;transmission electron microscopy;nanosensors