Defect‐Driven Magnetization Configuration of Isolated Linear Assemblies of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles

International audience; The magnetization state of one-dimensional magnetic nanoparticle chains plays a key role for a wide range of applications ranging from diagnosis and therapy in medicine to actuators, sensors and quantum recording media. The interplay between the exact particle orientation and the magnetic anisotropy is in turn crucial for controlling the overall magnetization state with high precision. Here, we report on a three-dimensional description of the magnetic structure of one-NP-wide chains. In this aim, we combined two complementary experimental techniques, magnetic force microscopy (MFM) and electronic holography (EH) which are sensitive to out-of-plane and in-plane magnetization components, respectively. We extended our approach to micromagnetic simulations which provided results in good agreement with MFM and EH. The findings are at variance with the known results on unidirectional nanoparticle assemblies, and show that magnetization is rarely strictly collinear to the chain axis. The magnetic structure of one-NP-wide chains can be interpreted as head-to-head magnetic domain structures with off-axis magnetization components, which is very sensitive to morphological defects in the chain structure such as minute size variation of NPs, tiny misalignment of NPs and/or crystal orientation with respect to easy magnetization axis.