The magnetic characteristics of FINEMET type glass-coated nanowires and submicron wires are investigated by taking into account the structural evolution induced by specific annealing all the way from a fully amorphous state to a nanocrystalline structure. The differences between the magnetic properties of these ultrathin wires and those of the thicker glass-coated microwires and “conventional” wires with similar structures have been emphasized and explained phenomenologically. The domain wall propagation in these novel nanowires and submicron wires, featuring a combination between an amorphous and a crystalline structure, has also been studied, given the recent interest in the preparation and investigation of new materials suitable for the development of domain wall logic applications.

Results on the preparation and magnetic characterization of rapidly solidified amorphous glass-coated nanowires are reported. Rapidly solidified nanowires have been investigated by means of bulk and surface hysteresis loop measurements, scanning electron microscopy, and ferromagnetic resonance. Domain wall velocity has been measured to demonstrate the suitability of the new nanowires for spintronic applications. Changes in composition, in the thickness of the glass coating, and nanowire dimensions allow extensive tailoring of the domain wall mobility.

Results on the magnetic behavior of glass-coated amorphous wires with metallic nucleus diameters in the submicron range are reported for the first time. The magnetic behavior of nearly zero magnetostrictive submicron amorphous wires is different from that observed in amorphous microwires with typical dimensions and similar composition. Submicron wires are bistable, whereas typical microwires show an almost anhysteretic loop. Bistability of submicron wires is maintained even in a very thin surface layer, which was shown to display a helical magnetic anisotropy. The origin of this specific behavior is the shape anisotropy which becomes dominant at lower dimensions of the metallic nucleus. The study of submicron amorphous wires opens up the way for new applications of amorphous wires.

A new method for measuring the domain wall velocity in a single, ultrathin ferromagnetic amorphous wire with the diameter down to 100 nm is presented. The method has been developed in order to increase the sensitivity in studying the domain wall propagation in bistable magnetic wires in a wide range of field amplitudes, with much larger values of the applied field as compared to those employed when studying the wall propagation in typical amorphous microwires. The large fields required to propagate the domain walls in ultrathin wires are able to nucleate new domain walls in the samples and, therefore, they can affect the accuracy of the entire measurement. The proposed experimental setup prevents such situations by using a number of complex pick-up coils, which allow the detection of the direction of the wall propagation along with the precise measurement of the domain wall velocity. The newly developed method is especially important now, when large effort is devoted to the development of domain wall logic devices based on ultrathin magnetic wires and nanowires.

Amorphous glass-coated microwires display a core-shell-type magnetic structure, whose main components, the inner core and the outer shell, have been extensively studied. In this paper, the interdomain wall that separates these two main components of the core-shell structure is investigated. The wall position and width in microwires with various compositions and dimensions are calculated. Experimental investigation techniques, such as ferromagnetic resonance, ultrahigh frequency giant magnetoimpedance, and axial hysteresis loop measurements, are subsequently employed to investigate those regions of the microwires in which the presence of the interdomain wall is expected to have the most significant effects. The investigation of the interdomain wall unveils aspects of the magnetism of these materials and opens up the way for the development of methods of controlled optimization of their magnetic properties in order to improve their response as sensitive elements in magnetic sensor devices.