Electrodeposited CoPt and FePt alloys nanowires

International audience; We have investigated CoPt and FePt alloys with the face centered tetragonal phase L10, which present very large magnetocrystalline anisotropy. Equiatomic CoPt nanowires exhibiting large coercive fields up to 1.1 T have been successfully prepared by electrodeposition into nanopores of commercial and home-made alumina membranes from a very simple electrolyte. The as-deposited material has the FCC structure with soft magnetic properties. An annealing treatment at 700 °C is crucial to transform this phase into the L1 0 phase, which presents hard magnetic properties. Nanowires of annealed samples consist of small grains around 20 nm, with their c axes randomly distributed. The coercivity does not depend on the morphology and porosity of the two types of membranes but only on the deposited material elaborated with the appropriate thermal annealing process. Our preliminary results with FePt alloy indicate a more complicated system since the as-deposited material shows no magnetization. Magnetism appears only after annealing at 700-750 °C. Coercivity up to 0.85 T has been obtained at room temperature but with inhomogeneous phase composition. To achieve a single hard phase L1 0, it is essential to get for the as-deposited sample the equiatomic composition and then to employ the suitable annealing parameters (temperature and time) to change the whole FCC phase into the FCT ordered L1 0 phase.