Electrical transport study of exchange bias in patterned Co/CoO bilayers

A stripe pattern of antiferromagnetic CoO is used to locally exchange bias a ferromagnetic Co film. Magnetization and magnetoresistance measurements enable to investigate the resulting change in the magnetization and the magnetic hysteresis behavior. The results demonstrate that a regular antiparallel stripe domain pattern can be created. Moreover, it is possible to tune the shape of the magnetic hysteresis by properly choosing the geometry of the CoO template.