Remote control of the Fe magnetic moment in magnetic heterostructures

¹  Department of Physics, Ruhr-University Bochum - 44780 Bochum, Germany
²  Department of Physics, Uppsala University - Box 530, 75121 Uppsala, Sweden
³  Saint-Petersburg State University, Vasilevsky Ostrov - 10 linia 49, 199178, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Corresponding author: arndt.remhof@empa.ch

Received: 13 April 2007
Accepted: 15 June 2007

Abstract

In magnetic superlattices with interlayer exchange coupling, not only the coupling strength but also the magnetic moment of the ferromagnetic layer can be altered non-locally by modifying the electronic structure of the non-magnetic spacer layer. Specifically, changes of the electronic structure of the V spacer layers in Fe/V (001) superlattices are seen to affect the adjacent Fe layers. By reversibly loading the V layer with hydrogen, the magnetic moment of Fe increases, whereas the induced magnetic moment in V remains unchanged. The nature of this remote and non-local control of the magnetic moment is connected with a d-electron charge transfer and effective shift of the Fermi level relative to the d-bands of Fe and V, as elucidated on the basis of self-consistent electronic structure calculations.