We demonstrate the existence of a helical state in patterned multilayer nanomagnets. The artificial helimagnets consist of a stack of single domain ferromagnetic disks separated by insulating nonmagnetic spacers. The spiral state is shown to originate from the magnetostatic interaction between nearest and next nearest neighbouring single-domain disks in the stack. Since the magnetostatic interaction for such disks is rather strong, the helical state should be stable at room temperature. The helimagnets were fabricated from a [Co/Si]*3 multilayer using electron beam lithography. The helical state was confirmed by a magnetic stray field analysis using magnetic force microscopy.
@article{arxiv.0705.2445,
title = {Artificial helical nanomagnets},
author = {A. A. Fraerman and B. A. Gribkov and S. A. Gusev and B. Hjorvarsson and A. Yu. Klimov and V. L. Mironov and D. S. Nikitushkin and V. V. Rogov and S. N. Vdovichev and H. Zabel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0705.2445},
year = {2007}
}