Induced In-Plane Anisotropy in Co/Pt Multilayers by Parallel Alignment of Stripe Domains: Tilted versus Perpendicular Magnetization Systems

Ferromagnetic films with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) are key spintronic platforms, enabling high-density magnetic memory, tunable stray fields in heterostructures, and channels for efficient, directional spin-wave propagation. Furthermore, these systems support a variety of magnetic domain configurations, from dense bubble domains to fully interconnected labyrinth or parallel aligned stripe domains. Here, we study two Co/Pt multilayer systems in their respective highly parallel stripe-domain states and report a significant in-plane magnetic anisotropy (≈ 80 kJ/m3) arising from rotational-symmetry breaking induced by domain alignment and texture. We find that the stripe-domain–induced anisotropy in our samples is nearly independent of the quality factor, which is used to distinguish between tilted and perpendicular magnetization regimes.