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Phys. Rev. B 57, 5951–5954 (1998)

[Issue 10 – 1 March 1998 ]

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Field-induced spin-reorientation transitions in magnetic multilayers with cubic anisotropy and biquadratic exchange

V. V. Kostyuchenko

Institute of Microelectronics, Russian Academy of Science, Universitetskaya 21, Yaroslavl, 150007, Russia

A. K. Zvezdin

Institute of General Physics, Russian Academy of Science, Vavilov 38, Moscow, 117942, Russia

A theoretical investigation of field-induced spin-reorientation phase transitions in magnetic multilayer structures is presented. We suppose that biquadratic and Heisenberg exchange energies between adjacent layers are of the same order of magnitude. The anisotropy energy is cubic. Our consideration is analogous to the Fe/Cr(100) superlattice system. We show that two phases with a noncollinear orientation of the magnetization in adjacent layers can represent the ground state. In our case an external magnetic field aligned perpendicular to the layers' direction induces spin-reorientation transitions in the plane of layers. A full list of such transitions is given. Other types of anisotropy are briefly discussed.

©1998 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v57/p5951
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.57.5951
PACS: 75.70.Cn, 75.50.Ss, 75.30.Kz, 85.70.Kh

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