Structure and magnetic properties of FeO / AlO multilayer thin films

K. L. SALCEDO RODRÍGUEZ; C. E. RODRÍGUEZ TORRES

Workshop; Surface and Interface Properties and Engineering - SIPE2012; 2012

Structure and magnetic properties of FeO / AlO multilayer thin films: Spin-based transport in semiconductor systems has been proposed as the base of a new class of spintronic devices. For the practical realization of such devices it is important to identify magnetic materials with diverse electronic transport properties (metallic, semiconducting, insulating) and sufficiently high Curie temperature that can be integrated in to spintronic devices. Promising classes of materials for this purpose are spinel oxides due to their more complex structure and the resulted many degrees of freedom. On the other hand, the epitaxial growth of nanometric iron ferrite on to single crystal substrates allows the stabilization of novel ferrite phases with properties dramatically differing from bulk ones. Inside the spinel group, little attention have be pointed out on AlFe2O4 one. This is a mixed oxide normal spinel, where one eighth of the tetrahedral sites are occupied by Fe2+ cations and one half of the octahedral sites are occupied by Al3+ cations. This distributions change depending on the synthetic process in this case the Fe2+ can also occupy octahedral sites. With the object to explore magnetic and transport properties of AlFe2O4 thin films we fabricated aluminum ferrites by magnetron sputtering from multilayer Al-O and Fe-O.