Ferromagnetism inside of magnetic tunneling junctions*

Over this past summer I performed research with different annealing temperatures cooling rates for Magnetic Tunneling Junctions (MTJ's). The MTJ's were composed of a 3nm FeCoB ferromagnet, a 1.6 nm MgO tunneling barrier, and a 3nm FeCoB ferromagnet pinned by a 15nm IrMn anti-ferromagnet. This speech also includes a review of concepts that include; coercivity (of the free and fixed layer), Tunneling Magneto resistance (TMR), exchange bias, and a basic concept of the parallel/anti-parallel configuration of the sample and how this affects resistance. This particular study was on two things; \begin{enumerate} \item How the maximum thermal annealing temperature affects TMR. \item How holding the maximum thermal annealing temperature constant and varying the cooling rates (.2 c/sec, 2 c/sec, 137 c/sec) affects the coercivity of the free layer and the exchange bias. \end{enumerate}