Growth and morphological properties of b-FeSi2 layers

b-FeSi2 layers were grown on Si(1 1 1) substrates by reactive deposition epitaxy under the presence of an Sb flux, and the morphological properties of the layers were investigated. The microscopic observations showed that the layer roughness, Ra, was 30–100 nm for the layers with a thickness of 44–540 nm. It has been also demonstrated that the surface roughness can be well estimated by the spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) measurements using an effective medium approximation (EMA).