Enhancement of Flux Pinning in the Superconductor-Ferromagnet Bilayer Nb(Co/Pd)

The magnetometry and the magnetic force microscopy are used to study the influence of the magnetic domain size on the flux pinning in a superconducting/ferromagnetic bilayer (SFB), in which the S layer is niobium and the F layer is a Co/Pd multilayer with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. The domain size is pre-defined using the angle-dependent demagnetization. The enhancement of pinning is found to be the strongest, up to a factor of 6, for narrow domains and small magnetic fields. This result differs from the behavior observed in the SFB in which the F layer is Co/Pt. The difference may be attributed to the degree of the disorder in the domain pattern.