Brillouin Light Scattering Study of the Magnetic Anisotropy in bcc-Fe(100) Ultrathin Films Grown on GaAs(100) Surfaces With Different Reconstructions

Author

Ha, Seung-Seok ; Kim, Nam-Hee ; You, Chun-Yeol ; Lee, Sukmock ; Ohta, Kenta ; Maruyama, Takuto ; Konishi, Katsunori ; Nozaki, Takayuki ; Suzuki, Yoshishige ; Van Roy, Willem

Author_Institution

Dept. of Phys., Inha Univ., Incheon

Volume

45

Issue

6

fYear

2009

fDate

6/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2527

Lastpage

2530

Abstract

We investigated the magnetic anisotropy of ultrathin bcc-Fe (001) films with a fcc-Au(001) cover layer, grown onto GaAs (001) (4 times 1) and (2 times 6)/(3 times 6) reconstructed surfaces. The magneto-optical Kerr effect hysteresis loops revealed existence of a strong in-plane uniaxial magnetic anisotropy in the Fe films grown on both the surfaces. Details of the in-plane uniaxial anisotropy (K_U), cubic anisotropy (K_C), and effective demagnetization field (4piM_eff) were studied by Brillouin light scattering method. We observed a stronger reduction of K_U, K_C, and 4piM_eff in thinner Fe layers (below 1.3 nm) grown on both the surfaces. In the case of Fe films grown on GaAs (4 times 1) surface, anisotropies observed were smaller than that for the (2 times 6)/(3 times 6) surface. This reflects the role of surface structure in determining the magnetic anisotropies.

Keywords

Brillouin spectra; Kerr magneto-optical effect; demagnetisation; ferromagnetic materials; iron; magnetic anisotropy; magnetic hysteresis; magnetic thin films; spin waves; surface magnetism; surface reconstruction; Brillouin light scattering; Fe; GaAs; GaAs (001) (2 times 6) reconstructed surfaces; GaAs (001) (4 times 1) reconstructed surfaces; GaAs (001)-(3 times 6) reconstructed surfaces; GaAs(100) surfaces; bcc-Fe (001) films; demagnetization field; fcc-Au(001) layer; magnetic hysteresis loops; magneto-optical Kerr effect; spin waves; surface structure; ultrathin films; uniaxial magnetic anisotropy; Brillouin light scattering; GaAs reconstruction; magnetic anisotropy; spin waves;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9464

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TMAG.2009.2018659

Filename

4957701