Study of angular dependence of exchange bias and misalignment in uniaxial and unidirectional anisotropy in NiFe(111)/FeMn(111)/CoFeB(amorphous) stack

We report the investigation of the in-plane azimuthal angular dependence of the magnetization reversal in the ion beam sputtered exchanged biased NiFe(111)/FeMn(111)/CoFeB(amorphous) stack. Compared to the as-deposited case, the magnetic annealing resulted in 3 fold enhancement in exchange bias but decrease in coercivity. The observed cosine dependence of exchange biased CoFeB layer on the in-plane azimuthal angle of applied field is corroborated with Meiklejohn and Bean model. The training effect associated with the exchange bias showed unconventional increase in coercivity after first cycle of hysteresis loop, while the exchange bias decreases sharply, and for subsequent cycles the exchange bias follows the empirical relation based on the energy dissipation in the AF layer. The ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) measurements also exhibited the in-plane azimuthal angle dependence of the magnetic resonance field indicating that the uniaxial and unidirectional anisotropies are not collinear, although they lie in the same plane. However, no misalignment between the unidirectional anisotropy and the exchange bias direction is observed. The misalignment angle between the uniaxial and unidirectional anisotropy, as measured by FMR, is found to be 10° and 14° for CoFeB and NiFe, respectively. This misalignment is attributed to the interface roughness as revealed by x-ray reflectance measurements.