Tunable misalignment of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic easy axes in exchange biased bilayers

In this paper we report experiments that show how to tune the unidirectional anisotropy field in exchange biased Ni81Fe19/Ir20Mn80 bilayers grown by sputtering. During growth the samples are held in an obliquely inclined stage, and simultaneously a static magnetic field is applied along an arbitrary direction in the film plane. While the direction of the ferromagnetic anisotropy field is given by the tilted columnar microstructures induced by the oblique sputtering, the direction of the unidirectional field can be tuned by the application of the in situ magnetic field. The magnetic properties were investigated using the ferromagnetic resonance technique. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4729040]