Noncollinear magnetism in Permalloy

Markus Eisenbach, G. Malcolm Stocks, Don M. Nicholson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Permalloy is an important material in a wide variety of magnetic systems, most notably in giant-magnetoresistive read heads. However, despite this great interest, its properties are not fully understood. For an in depth analysis of important physical properties as, e.g., electric transport or magnetic anisotropy, a detailed understanding of the distribution of magnetic moments on an atomic level is necessary. Using our first principles locally self-consistent multiple scattering method, we calculate the magnetic ground state structure for a large supercell model of Permalloy. Our code allows us to solve both the usual nonrelativistic Schrödinger equation as well as the fully relativistic Dirac equation and to find the magnitude and direction of the magnetic moments at each atomic site. While the nonrelativistic calculation yields a collinear ground state in accordance with previous calculations, we find the ground state for the fully relativistic calculation to be slightly noncollinear. We also investigate the influence of variations in the iron concentration on the distribution of magnetic moments.

Original languageEnglish
Article number09G503
JournalJournal of Applied Physics
Volume101
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007

Funding

This research was supported in part by an appointment (M.E.) to the Postgraduate Research Program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. This was sponsored by DOE-OS, BES-DMSE, and OASCR-MICS under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle LLC. The calculations presented in this paper were performed at the Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) at ORNL and at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

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