Studies of Effects of Current on Exchange-Bias: A Brief Review

MacDonald and co-workers recently predicted that high current densities could affect the magnetic order of antiferromagnetic (AFM) multilayers, in ways similar to those that occur in ferromagnetic (F) multilayers, and that changes in AFM magnetic order can produce an antiferromagnetic Giant Magnetoresistance (AGMR). Four groups have now studied current-driven effects on exchange bias at F/AFM interfaces. In this paper, we first briefly review the main predictions by MacDonald and co-workers, and then the results of experiments on exchange bias that these predictions stimulated.

Ballistic vs Diffusive Transport in Current-Induced Magnetization Switching

We test whether current-induced magnetization switching due to spin-transfer-torque in ferromagnetic/non-magnetic/ferromagnetic (F/N/F) trilayers changes significantly when scattering within the N-metal layers is changed from ballistic to diffusive. Here ballistic corresponds to a ratio r = lambda/t greater than or equal to 3 for a Cu spacer layer, and diffusive to r = lambda/t less than or equal to 0.4 for a CuGe alloy spacer layer, where lambda is the mean-free-path in the N-layer of fixed thickness t = 10 nm. The average switching currents for the alloy spacer layer are only modestly larger than those for Cu. The best available model predicts a much greater sensitivity of the switching currents to diffuse scattering in the spacer layer than we see.