Resonant and non-resonant microwave absorption as a probe of the magnetic dynamics and switching in spin valves

We use the resonant and non-resonant microwave absorption to probe the dynamic and static magnetic parameters of weakly coupled spin valves. The sample series include spin valve structures with varying thickness of the non-magnetic metallic spacer and reference samples comprised only a free or fixed magnetic layer. Beside the common resonance absorption peaks, the observed microwave spectra present step-like features with hysteretic behavior. The latter effect is a direct manifestation of the interlayer coupling between the ferromagnetic layers and provides two static magnetic parameters, the switching field and coercivity of the fixed layer. The analysis of the microwave absorption spectra under in-plane rotation of the applied magnetic field at different spacer thicknesses permits a deeper insight in the magnetic interactions in this system as compared to the conventional magnetometry. We combine the standard Smit-Beljers formalism for the angular dependence of the resonance fields with a Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert dynamics extended to describe in detail the intensity of microwave absorption in the spin valves. In this way, we extract a set of parameters for each layer including the effective magnetization and anisotropy, exchange bias and interlayer coupling, as well as Gilbert damping. The model reproduces well the experimental findings, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and the estimated parameters are in a reasonable agreement with the values known from the literature. The proposed theoretical treatment can be adopted for other multilayered dynamic systems as, e. g., spin-torque oscillators. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.