Tailoring exchange-dominated synthetic layered antiferromagnets: From collective reversal to exchange bias

Not only since the progressive reduction of structure sizes in modern micro- and nanotechnology, surface and interface effects have played an ever-increasing role and nowadays often dominate the behavior of entire systems. Therefore, understanding the nature of surface and interface effects and being able to fully control them is of fundamental importance, in particular in modern thin-film technology. In this study, it is revealed how Co/Pt multi-layer-based synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs) with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in the regime of dominating antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange can be employed to control the collective magnetic reversal via systemati-cally altering surface and interface effects. The specifically designed samples and experiments highlight the superior tunability of synthetic systems as compared to their intrinsic stoichiometric counterparts, where the antiferro-magnetism is directly tied to the indivisible discrete atomic nature and crystal structure of the materials. Thus, it is demonstrated that in SAFs, it becomes possible to energetically heal the broken magnetic symmetry at the surface, thereby enabling either on demand suppression or controlled enhancement of respective surface and interface effects, as demonstrated here in this study for the surface spin-flop and the exchange bias effect.