Giant magnetic anisotropy energy and coercivity in Fe island and atomic wire on W(110)

2012

We have directly investigated the giant magnetic anisotropy energy and coercivity of monolayer (ML) Fe islands and stripes on flat and stepped W(110) surfaces using x-ray magnetic circular dichroism. Both for islands and stripes, the magnetic anisotropy energy is $\ensuremath{\sim}$1.0 meV/atom, independent of the coverage below 0.5 ML. On the contrary, the coercive field of the islands rapidly drops from 4.3 T at 0.25 ML to 1.9 T at 0.50 ML, while that of the stripes moderately degrades from 3.5 T at 0.15 ML ($\ensuremath{\sim}$3 atom rows) to 3.0 T at 0.50 ML. We explain the contrastive behavior for the islands and stripes by different nucleation and remagnetization processes. Considering…