The Role of Neutron Scattering in Magnetic Storage Materials Research

As the demand for highly functional magnetic storage materials grows, the need to understand the basic physical properties behind these materials has become key to engineering storage devices. Neutron scattering techniques provide a way to probe the magnetic properties of potential memory materials. The highlighted techniques, polarized neutron reflectometry, small angle neutron scattering, and neutron diffraction, are sensitive to not only nuclear but also magnetic structure and are capable of investigating a large range of real space length scales. In this paper, we review recent research on magnetic thin films and layered systems with potential for storage applications. We focus on several important aspects of layered magnetic memory devices, including exchange bias, interfaces and interactions between layers, and magnetic reversal.