Figure 3

(a) Schematic of the simulated MTJ structure: free layer (FL) top and pinned layer (PL) bottom. Major (b) and minor (c) hysteresis loops for an MTJ of diameter 30 nm at 300 K, the dotted lines mark the coercivity of FL. The major loops show a large enhancement of both layer coercivities due to the coupling to the stray field. The minor loop exhibits a shift of the hysteresis loop due to the asymmetric effect of the pinned layer stray field for descending and ascending branches ΔH _c of 0.12 T, which is larger than the distribution of coercivity of FL.