Interlayer coupling in Ni–Fe/Au/Co/Au multilayers

Abstract The coupling between permalloy and cobalt layers (characterized by in-plane and perpendicular anisotropy, respectively) in NiFe/Au/Co/Au sandwich films and multilayers was investigated. In sandwich samples the main contribution to the effective coupling comes from the structural imperfections (pinholes and interface roughness). For multilayers, due to creation of dense stripe domains in Co layers, the supplementary coupling is observed in the field range defined by the nucleation and annihilation of the domains.