## Wall energy and wall thickness of exchange-coupled rare-earth transition-metal triple layer stacks

• The room-temperature wall energy sw 54.0310 23 J/m 2 of an exchange-coupled Tb 19.6 Fe 74.7 Co 5.7 /Dy 28.5 Fe 43.2 Co 28.3 double layer stack can be reduced by introducing a soft magnetic intermediate layer in between both layers exhibiting a significantly smaller anisotropy compared to Tb+- FeCo and Dy+- FeCo. sw will decrease linearly with increasing intermediate layer thickness, d IL , until the wall is completely located within the intermediate layer for d IL d w , where d w denotes the wall thickness. Thus, d w can be obtained from the plot sw versus d IL .We determined sw and d w on Gd+- FeCo intermediate layers with different anisotropy behavior ~perpendicular and in-plane easy axis! and compared the results with data obtained from Brillouin light-scattering measurements, where exchange stiffness, A, and uniaxial anisotropy, K u , could be determined. With the knowledge of A and K u , wall energy and thickness were calculated and showed an excellent agreement with the magnetic measurements. A ten times smaller perpendicular anisotropy of Gd 28.1 Fe 71.9 in comparison to Tb+- FeCo and Dy+- FeCo resulted in a much smaller sw 51.1310 23 J/m 2 and d w 524 nm at 300 K. A Gd 34.1 Fe 61.4 Co 4.5 with in-plane anisotropy at room temperature showed a further reduced sw 50.3310 23 J/m 2 and d w 517 nm. The smaller wall energy was a result of a different wall structure compared to perpendicular layers.

$Rev: 12793$