AVS 50th International Symposium
    Magnetic Interfaces and Nanostructures Wednesday Sessions
       Session MI+TF-WeA

Paper MI+TF-WeA1
Electrodeposition of Epitaxially Grown Fe Films on n-type GaAs

Wednesday, November 5, 2003, 2:00 pm, Room 316

Session: Magnetic Thin Films
Presenter: Y.-K. Liu, The University of Alabama
Authors: C. Scheck, The University of Alabama
Y.-K. Liu, The University of Alabama
G. Zangari, University of Virginia
R. Schad, The University of Alabama
Correspondent: Click to Email
Epitaxial growth of Fe thin films on both n-type GaAs(001) and n-type GaAs(011) substrates have been demonstrated using Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) in the past. Indeed, Fe and GaAs lattice constants match very well leading to easy epitaxial growth. However, special surface preparation or growth at elevated temperature were needed to obtain good quality films. Also diffusion and segregation of substrate material (As) at the surface, characteristic of intermixing at the interface, were observed on MBE grown films. Electrodeposition (ECD) technique on the contrary is an equilibrium process which thus releases much less energy per absorbed atom than other deposition techniques (MBE). This allows preparation of chemically sharp interfaces (i.e. no intermixing) which otherwise show a high degree of reactivity and interdiffusion. We reported for the first time the epitaxial growth of high quality Fe thin films on both n-type GaAs(001) and n-type GaAs(011) substrates using ECD. Two different electrolytes FeSO4 and FeC§¤2 solutions 0.1M were used at pH 2.5. Results from X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) show Fe(001)[110]//GaAs(001)[110] and Fe(011)[100]//GaAs(011)[100] as the primary epitaxial relations similarly to Fe films grown by MBE. These films' in-plane magnetic anisotropy is related to the crystalline structure. Their coercivity Hc is around 30-100 Oe.