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Exchange bias or exchange anisotropy occurs in bilayers (or multilayers) of magnetic materials where the hard magnetization behavior of an antiferromagnetic thin film causes a shift in the soft magnetization curve of a ferromagnetic film. The exchange bias phenomenon is of tremendous utility in magnetic recording, where it is used to pin the state of the readback heads of hard disk drives at exactly their point of maximum sensitivity; hence the term "bias." ==Fundamental science== The essential physics underlying the phenomenon is the exchange interaction between the antiferromagnet and ferromagnet at their interface. Since antiferromagnets have a small or no net magnetization, their spin orientation is only weakly influenced by an externally applied magnetic field. A soft ferromagnetic film which is strongly exchange-coupled to the antiferromagnet will have its interfacial spins pinned. Reversal of the ferromagnet's moment will have an added energetic cost corresponding to the energy necessary to create a Néel domain wall within the antiferromagnetic film. The added energy term implies a shift in the switching field of the ferromagnet. Thus the magnetization curve of an exchange-biased ferromagnetic film looks like that of the normal ferromagnet except that is shifted away from the H=0 axis by an amount Hb. In most well-studied ferromagnet/antiferromagnet bilayers, the Curie temperature of the ferromagnet is larger than the Néel temperature TN of the antiferromagnet. This inequality means that the direction of the exchange bias can be set by cooling through TN in the presence of an applied magnetic field. The moment of the magnetically ordered ferromagnet will apply an effective field to the antiferromagnet as it orders, breaking the symmetry and influencing the formation of domains. Exchange anisotropy has long been poorly understood due to the difficulty of studying the dynamics of domain walls in thin antiferromagnetic films. A naive approach to the problem would suggest the following expression for energy per unit area: where ''n'' is the number of interfacial spins interactions per unit area, Jex is the exchange constant at the interface, S refers to the spin vector, M refers to the magnetization, t refers to film thickness and H is the external field. The subscript F describes the properties of the ferromagnet and AF to the antiferromagnet. The expression omits magnetocrystalline anisotropy, which is unaffected by the presence of the antiferromagnet. At the switching field of the ferromagnet, the pinning energy represented by the first term and the Zeeman dipole coupling represented by the second term will exactly balance. The equation then predicts that the exchange bias shift Hb will be given by the expression Many experimental findings regarding the exchange bias contradict this simple model. For example, the magnitude of measured Hb values is typically 100 times less than that predicted by the equation for reasonable values of the parameters. The amount of hysteresis shift Hb is not correlated with the density ''n'' of uncompensated spins in the plane of the antiferromagnet that appears at the interface. In addition, the exchange bias effect tends to be smaller in epitaxial bilayers than in polycrystalline ones, suggesting an important role for defects. In recent years progress in fundamental understanding has been made via synchrotron radiation based element-specific magnetic linear dichroism experiments that can image antiferromagnetic domains and frequency-dependent magnetic susceptibility measurements that can probe the dynamics. Experiments on the Fe/FeF2 and Fe/MnF2 model systems have been particularly fruitful. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Exchange bias」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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