Magnetic Anisotropies and Damping in Multilayered Thin Films

Abstract

Magnetic materials are ubiqutous in technology that we use on a daily basis. They are used as storage medium in hard drives, to read out the information with the hard drive read head, and to design sensors used in cars and cell phones to only name a few examples. The dynamic response of magnetic materials to an excitation is a crucial aspect of many of these applications and devices.In the following section a short introduction to the magnetization dynamics will be given with a special emphasis on ferromagnetic resonance phenomena. The concept of magnetic anisotropies and the importance of magnetic relaxation is also discussed in this section. This is followed by a detailed description of the experimental technique of broadband ferromagnetic resonance spectroscopy that is used throughout this dissertation. The last section of this chapter discusses and summarizes the magnetic anisotropy and relaxation studies carried out as part of this dissertation.