Study of roughness effect in Fe and Co thin films prepared by plasma magnetron sputtering

Abstract

We report the experimental and theoretical study of a substrate roughness surface induced magnetic anisotropy in thin films of Fe and Co. The experimental results confirm previously reported data on NiFe thin films and indicate that rough substrates increase the magnetic coercive fields in magnetic thin films. This effect is most prominent in films of thickness comparable to the surface roughness values and materials of small volume magnetic anisotropy. We determined the coercive field of 15 nm Fe thin film sample deposited onto rough PVDF to be 256 Oe, which is more than doubled the value of the coercive field of 15 nm Fe films coated under identical conditions, onto smooth Si substrates. The effect is visible for Co films but weaken by its increased volume magnetic anisotropy. These results are important for applications based on magnetic thin film where the magnetic properties could be adjusted via substrate roughness engineering

Boris computational spintronics—High performance multi-mesh magnetic and spin transport modeling software

“…Further extensions to the micromagnetics model include topographical roughness and staircase corrections for the demagnetizing field, detailed previously [27] and tested experimentally [55][56][57], as well as magneto-elastic contributions [58,59]. Finally, all the material parameters included in simulations may be assigned spatial and temporal dependences either through user-supplied mathematical formulas, input data files, or built-in generators.…”

Room Temperature Ferromagnetism in Graphene/SiC(0001) System Intercalated by Fe and Co

“…The latter depends strongly on the morphology and the shape of crystallites in polycrystals as well as on the type and the number. [ 65,66 ] All these factors can significantly increase H c in our case.…”

The high magnetoresistance performance of epitaxial half-metallic CrO2-based magnetic junctions

“…Variations in coercivity may come from two competitive sources: (i) the additional pinning effect, which leads to larger coercivity in thinner films due to film inhomogeneity, as discernable from our previous ferromagnetic resonance studies, and (ii) the grain size effect, which is believed to contribute to lower coercivity in thinner films due to smaller grain sizes. 13,28 To implement successive magnetization reversal in the top and bottom electrodes, it is necessary to appropriately select the thickness of the bottom and top CrO 2 electrodes while fabricating the CrO 2 /TiO 2 /CrO 2 MTJ. An obvious coercivity difference between the top and bottom electrodes is beneficial to high accuracy in data written processes.…”