NiO antiferromagnetic material possesses certain advantages for spin valve applications and has attracted considerable attention. Some of the key advantages are its insulating properties, very high corrosion resistance, less sensitivity to composition, and its low reset temperature. This material, however, has a low blocking temperature which prevents its application to simple spin valve designs. The use of this material in spin valve structures required significant improvements in thermal stability, blocking temperature, and the spin valve design. In the present study, the blocking temperature and the blocking temperature distribution of the NiO films have been improved by depositing the films reactively using ion beam sputtering. A number of improvements in the processing method and deposition system had to be made to allow full NiO spin valve deposition for mass production. Another critical part was the use of antiparallel pinned design in place of the simple design to improve the thermal stability of the NiO spin valves as read elements at disk drive temperatures. The selection of the ferromagnetic pinned layers and the Ru spacer thickness in AP-pinned spin valves has significant impact on the behavior of the devices. These spin valves are all bottom type, NiO/PL1/Ru/PL2/Cu/Co/NiFe/Ta, where the metallic portion of the spin valve is deposited on top of the NiO AF layer. The PL1 and PL2 are ferromagnetic layers comprising NiFe and Co layers. Read elements have been made using these spin valves that delivered areal densities of 12 Gbit/in. These topics and other improvements which resulted in successful use of NiO spin valves as GMR heads in hard disk drives will be discussed.
A magnetoresistive gradiometer to detect perpendicularly recorded transitions has been conceived. It utilizes two parallel magnetoresistive stripes with opposing sense/bias currents. The magnetoresistive elements mutually bias each other with the same polarity bias fields. The fields of a perpendicular transition centered between the two stripes increase the resistance of one stripe while decreasing that of the other, therefore providing maximum output signal using differential detection. The detector provides a Lorenztian-type readback waveform and rejection of common-mode noise. The experimental readback waveform exhibited a pulse width at half maximum of 0.7 μm for a head flying at 0.2 μm above the media surface.
We have developed a magnetic imaging scheme using the magnetoresistive spin valve head in a dc bias mode as a sensing element. By scanning the head in contact with the sample we obtain a submicron spatial resolution map of the normal component of the magnetic field in the temperature range 4.2–300 K. The writing element of the sensor can be used to alter the local magnetic structure in a controlled way. This technique was applied to image the magnetic domain structure down to 77 K in patterned thin films of La0.67Sr0.33MnO3, known for their colossal magnetoresistance. A reorientation of single or multiple domains in the films was accomplished by applying a local magnetic field with the writing element, while the effect on magnetotransport was monitored with the simultaneous measurement of current–voltage characteristics.
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