The effects of oxygen on cobalt titanium and cobalt platinum thin films

Oxygen has been intentionally incorporated into sputtered Co-Ti and Co-Pt films by the addition of controlled amounts of oxygen to the argon sputter gas atmosphere. The influence of the oxygen incorporation was evaluated by the analysis of the magnetic properties and the structural characteristics of the films. The coercivity increases with increasing oxygen in Co-Ti, but decreases slightly in Co-Pt films. Both the saturation magnetization (Ms) and the remanent magnetization (Mr) increase initially and then decrease in Co-Ti as oxygen increases. However, in Co-Pt, Msdecreases continuously as [0] increases, while Mrincreases. The differences in the magnetic behavior of the two systems are related to the differences in oxygen affinity for Ti and Pt.