The appearance of biquadratic exchange coupling between soft Fe and hard SmCo thin layers is found. The remanent magnetization in the Fe layer reorients from parallel to perpendicular with respect to the SmCo easy axis after application of large enough negative field. To explain such an unexpected behavior in contacting ferromagnetic layers a model is proposed based on Slonczewski's fluctuating exchange mechanism. In our samples a partial remagnetization of the hard layer creates fluctuations of the bilinear interactions. The intralayer exchange averaging of the resulting magnetization fluctuations in the soft layer causes the observed biquadratic coupling.

• Received 9 November 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.4386