Refine
Year of publication
- 1996 (2)
Document Type
- Preprint (2)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Faculty / Organisational entity
Suppression of the magnetocrystalline bulk anisotropy in thin epitaxial Co(110) films on Cu(110)
(1996)
We report on an unexpected suppression of the magnetocrystalline anisotropy contribution in epitaxial fcc Co(110) films on Cu(110) below a thickness of dc=(50 +/- 10) Å. For film thicknesses larger than dc the measured anisotropy value agrees with published data. Measurements on films with reduced strain indicate a large strain dependence of dc . A model calculation based on a crystal-field formalism and discussed within the context of band theory, which explicitly takes tetragonal misfit strains into account, reproduces the experimen-tally observed anomalies. Our results indicate that the usually applied phenomenological description of anisotropies, assuming additive free energy terms for each anisotropy contribution, fails in this case.
The magnetic anisotropy of Co/Cu~001! films has been investigated by the magneto-optical Kerr effect, both in the pseudomorphic growth regime and above the critical thickness where strain relaxation sets in. A clear correlation between the onset of strain relaxation as measured by means of reflection high-energy electron diffraction and changes of the magnetic anisotropy has been found.