Stress tunable microwave absorption of ferromagnetic microwires for sensing applications

In the present work, we have studied the low field absorption (LFA) at 9 GHz of a set of Co-based glass-coated microwires in the presence of tensile stresses along the wire axis. The results reveal that the absorption profiles bear valve-like features associated with microwave magnetoimpedance effect. The stress applied along the wire axis compensates the reverse effect of magnetic field on absorption. The peak shown in the derivative LFA spectra becomes wider with increasing stress and moves to higher field, corresponding to the magnetization process. A larger ratio of metal to total diameter was found to be favorable to microwave absorption due to the smaller anisotropy and also gave rise to a larger magnetostriction constant. The influences of stress/magnetic field on the absorption as well as the shift of feature stress with wire geometry were discussed in the context of an effective microwire-based sensor design. Calculations of magnetostriction constant by the derived field dependence of anisotropy field were also performed to demonstrate the usefulness of stress tunable microwave absorption characteristics as a research tool.