Influence of the pore diameter in Cu/Co/Cu antidots: A XANES study

Antidot materials, i.e., two-dimensional nanostructures with a periodic array of nanopores, are of great scientific interest due to their unique nanomagnetic properties and their potential application in storage devices. It is well known that physical properties of antidots are directly linked to the diameter of nanopores and their spacing, as well as to the morphology and the localizations of chemical species. However, due to their nanoscale size, their characterization remains challenging. Here, we present a detailed investigation of the morphology and presence of oxide species in antidots as a function of the pore diameter using polarized x-ray absorption spectroscopy. For this study we synthesized and characterized Cu(10 nm)/Co(12 nm)/Cu(10 nm) sputtered antidots, fabricated by the double-anodization technique assisted by atomic layer deposition. The pore size ranged from 20 to 80 nm, with a fixed interpore distance (105 nm). An unholed multilayer deposited on Si/${\mathrm{SiO}}_{2}$ was also investigated for comparison. We observed a clear correlation between the increase of pore diameter and the enhancement of oxide content from three different x-ray absorption near edge structure analysis methods. Polarized XAS allowed us to localize the CoO nanorings inside the pores. We propose that the CoO formation is directly related to the crescent shape of the multilayer deposit inside the pores. The coercivity of antidots is enhanced by increasing the magnetic atomic proportion in the periphery of nanopores. The structural observations were also used to develop a simple model in order to estimate the proportion of atoms inside the pores and on the top of the antidots as a function of the interpore distance, the hole diameter, and the penetration length of deposition inside the pores. This model can be easily used in the literature for estimating the atomic species deposited on antidots.