Fabrication, Characterization and Analysis of Patterned Nano-Sized Material With Large Magnetic Permeability At High Frequency

Magnetic mesoscopic and nano-sized structures have promising applications such as high-density data storage, magnetic field sensors, and microwave devices. Patterned magnetic structures are especially interesting because their constitutive material, sizes and geometry are easily adjustable in fabrication. This makes manipulation of electromagnetic properties possible and creates many novel features never discovered in conventional bulk materials. The artificial magnetic structures that can be engineered to meet specific application purposes are called magnetic metamaterials. This thesis aims to investigate magnetic materials nanostructured to produce high permeability and low loss performance at gigahertz (GHz) frequency region. Such property is highly desired for communication devices with miniaturized size, reduced energy consumption and enhanced signal detection sensitivity. Antennas, microwave field sensors are the examples of applications. We first analyze the single domain model for ac magnetization to get theoretical understanding and prediction. Then we evaluate all free energy terms for a magnetic dipole to know which energies (or fields) are contributing to the effective magnetic field in our real experiments. Secondly experiment work including fabrication, dc characterization and ac characterization of Permalloy and cobalt nanoscale magnetic structures, as well as FePt nanoparticles are covered. Different microwave techniques regarding sensitive magnetic permeability measurements are discussed in detail for comparison. In the last chapter, micromagnetic simulations are performed to obtain broadband ac magnetization response spectrum for a single Permalloy nanowire and two interacting Permalloy nanowires