Tools for controlling magnetism at the nanoscale are crucial for the development of new paradigms in optics, electronics and spintronics. Thermally assisted magnetic nanopatterning (tam-SPL) is a new concept for creating reconfigurable magnetic nanopatterns, by crafting at the nanoscale the magnetic anisotropy landscape of a ferromagnetic layer exchange-coupled to an antiferromagnetic one. By performing a highly localized field cooling with the hot tip of a scanning probe microscope, magnetic structures, with arbitrarily oriented magnetization and tunable unidirectional anisotropy, are patterned without modifying the film chemistry and topography. The technique combines the full reversibility of exchange bias, with the resolution and versatility of scanning probe lithography and holds great promise for magnetic logic and storage technologies.
