Investigation of multilayer local tilt within long portion of single Co/Cu nanowires

In this work arrays of Co/Cu multilayer nanowires were fabricated by electrodeposition to develop giant magnetoresistive sensors. Structure and morphology defects within 6 μm long portions of single nanowires have been probed by electron and ion-beam microscopies. It has been discovered that the most recurrent growth defect is a tilt of the nanowire layers, which varies along the length of the nanowires, this effect being more significant for nanowires of larger diameters; nevertheless, the nanowire arrays fabricated in this work demonstrated a magnetoresistive response which is very close to the behavior of analogous systems previously reported in the literature. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.