Strain-engineering of magnetic anisotropy in CoxNi1-x-SrTiO3/SrTiO3(001) vertically assembled nanocomposites

Ultrathin CoxNi1-x alloy nanowires vertically embedded in SrTiO3/SrTiO3 (001) thin films were grown using a self-assembly approach based on sequential pulsed laser deposition. Due to vertical epitaxial coupling of the metallic and oxide phases, a large average tensile strain of up to 4% arises within the nanowires, which is evidenced using a combination of x-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. Macroscopic magnetometry experiments are used to demonstrate that this huge deformation allows us to enhance the uniaxial anisotropy of the nanowires, leading to saturation field in excess of 1 T in the hard direction, large coercive field at low temperature along the easy axis, and to a blocking temperature exceeding 600 K in the case of nanowires with a diameter of 5 nm and 78% Co content. These data are complemented with angular dependent x-ray magnetic circular dichroism measurements at the Co and Ni L-2,L-3 edges. The value of the magnetic moment was extracted from these measurements by applying sum rules and the anisotropy of the orbital moment was investigated.