Activation of antiferromagnetic domain switching in exchange-coupled Fe/CoO/MgO(001) systems

In contrast to the extensive study of domain reversal in ferromagnetic materials, the domain switching process in antiferromagnets is much less studied due to the difficulty of probing antiferromagnetic spins. Using a combination of hysteresis loop, Kerr microscope, and x-ray magnetic linear dichroism measurements, we investigated the antiferromagnetic (AFM) domain switching process in single crystalline Fe/CoO bilayers on MgO(001). We demonstrate that the CoO AFM switching is a Kolmogorov-Avrami process in which the thermal activation energy creates AFM domain nucleation centers which further expand by domain wall propagation. From the temperature- and thickness-dependent measurements, we are able to retrieve quantitatively the important parameter of the CoO AFM activation energy, which is shown to increase linearly with CoO thickness.