Making use of the technological advances in the field of nanofabrication and high-speed electronics
over the last two decades, the VNA-FMR technique has been evolved in the recent years. It offers numerous advantages over conventional FMR and has proven to be an excellent tool for the characterization of the high frequency magnetization dynamics in thin films.
In the first part of the talk, a short introduction to the theory of FMR will be given, which is followed by a comparison of conventional FMR and VNA-FMR. Furthermore, details of a broadband VNA-FMR spectrometer, whose unique feature is its capability to perform angulardependent in- and out-of-plane measurements, will be outlined.
In the second part of the talk, the implications of ion irradiation on the static and dynamic magnetic
properties of NiFe/Ta thin films and multilayers are discussed. Moreover, it is shown that it is possible to determine the saturation magnetization of these samples from polar MOKE and VNAFMR measurements, circumventing the problem of the unknown effective magnetic volume that
causes conventional techniques like SQUID or VSM to fail.