Thickness-dependent magnetic properties of Ni65Fe28Ga7 films prepared by magnetron co-sputtering

In this paper, we investigated the structure and magnetic properties of Ni65Fe28Ga7 films with different thicknesses prepared by magnetron co-sputtering. We found the grain size is less than 8 nm for all films and increases with the thickness. For the thinner films with the thickness lower than the critical value, the effective saturated magnetization is about 8.4 kGs, while the saturated field and coercivity are, respectively, lower than 25 Oe and 15 Oe. The films exhibit good soft magnetic properties and the Gilbert damping increases almost linearly with the thickness. Above the critical thickness, the stripe domains are observed. As the thickness increases further, the stripe domains widen and the rotatable anisotropy strengthens.