Enhancement of magnetic coercivity in Fe/Mn and Co/Mn bilayers

Abstract The dependence of the coercive field and saturated magnetization on the interfacial width is studied to understand the driving mechanism of the coercive enhancement in Fe/Mn and Co/Mn bilayers. We establish a controlled annealing procedure to reveal the origin of this enhancement. Using a model, we reveal that the full interfacial width plays a keyrole, and that no Mn based finite size effects drive the mechanism. We show that this mechanism is common to both type of bilayers.