Origin of the Periodic Component of Anisotropy Dispersion in Ni-Fe Thin Films

Angular dispersion of the uniaxial anisotropy in Ni-Fe films measured by the macroscopic methods was found to have two components, one of which makes the direction of the magnetization change periodically and the other non-periodically. The former is thought to come from the same origin as that of the magnetization ripple. The random local anisotropy energy, however, was estimated from Hoffmann's theory to be about 3∼15 times as large as the magneto-crystalline anisotropy energy. This result suggests that the periodic component mainly comes from the randomly oriented magneto-elastic energy of the crystallites corresponding to the stress of about 3×10 9 dyn/cm 2 .