Surfactant-assisted epitaxial growth and magnetism of Fe films on Cu(111)

M A NIÑO; J CAMARERO; L GÓMEZ; J FERRÓN; J J DE MIGUEL,; R.MIRANDA

JOURNAL OF PHYSICS CONDENSED MATTER

Institut of Phsycs

Lugar: London; Año: 2008 vol. 20 p. 265008 - 265015

0953-8984

The magnetic properties of thin epitaxial layers of Fe grown on Cu(111) depend sensitively onthe films’ structure and morphology. A combination of experiments and numerical simulationsreveals that the use of a surfactant monolayer (ML) of Pb during molecular beam epitaxy(MBE) growth at room temperature reduces the amount of interdiffusion at the Cu–Fe interface,retards the fcc-to-bcc transformation by about 2 ML and substantially increases the films’coercivity. The origin of all these alterations to the magnetic behavior can be traced back to thestructural modifications provoked by the surfactant during the early growth stages. Theseresults open the way for the controlled fabrication of custom-designed materials with specificmagnetic characteristics.