Thermal stability of a nanostructured trilayer synthetic antiferromagnet

Abstract

Thermal stability of a nanostructured trilayer synthetic antiferromagnet is investigated in the Worledge model. No or minimal shape anisotropy effect is predicted from the model due to the simplifying assumption that the self-demagnetizing field is equal to the dipole field. A slight relaxation of the assumption causes a large impact on the thermal stability. In the case that the dipole field is 90% of the demagnetizing field, the energy barrier to spin flop is doubled to 80 kT in a typical ellipsoid cell (212x106 nm(2)) for high density magnetic random access memory. The thermal stability of half-selected cells in the writing scheme based on the spin flop is also improved by relaxing the assumption over the applied field range relevant to magnetic random access memory applications. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.