Magnetic properties of cobalt and cobalt-platinum nanocrystals investigated by magneto-optical Kerr effect

Magneto-optical Kerr effect, is used to investigate the magnetization of film made of uncoalesced cobalt and cobalt-platinum nanocrystals. For the pure cobalt nanocrystals, different film morphologies are obtained through application of magnetic field during deposition. These morphologies have quite different magnetic properties, which is rationalized by considering dipolar interactions and the associated demagnetizing factor. We show that fast annealing can be used to trigger changes in the particles' crystalline structure while largely avoiding their coalescence. With increasing the annealing temperature, 2.7 nm CoPt nanocrystals show a transition from the magnetically soft face-centered-cubic phase to the hard face-centered-tetragonal L1(0) phase. In particular fast annealing to 950 K is shown to produce largely uncoalesced nanocrystals ferromagnetic at room temperature. With 7 nm cobalt nanocrystals, fast annealing at 500 K equally results in ferromagnetism at room temperature without inducing coalescence between the nanocrystals in the film. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.