Characterization of individual ferromagnetic nanowires by in-plane magnetic measurements of arrays

We present a phenomenological model for the interaction field in ferromagnetic nanowire arrays and use it to obtain the effective anisotropy field of individual nanowires, from the in-plane saturation field of the array. In contrast to other methods which may be used to estimate this parameter, the proposed strategy requires no knowledge of the saturation magnetization nor of the nanowire radius. Applied to three arrays of different compositions, this approach yields an equivalent anisotropy field of the individual nanowires approximately equal to M-s/2, indicating that its origin is the demagnetizing field of the wire. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.