Thermal stability of patterned Co/Pd nanodot arrays

We have studied the magnetic reversal and thermal stability of [Co(0.3 nm)/Pd(0.7 nm)]N multilayers patterned into 35-nm-diameter nanodot arrays. The short-time coercive fields are relatively constant with N while the room-temperature thermal stability parameter increases nearly linearly with N. However the magnetic switching volume extracted from the thermal stability is significantly less than the physical volume of the samples. The experimental results are in quantitative agreement with micromagnetic modeling, which indicates that reversal and thermal stability is controlled by nucleation and propagation of edge domains. VC 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3692574]