1. Growth of [001]-oriented polycrystalline Heusler alloy thin films using [001]-textured Ag buffer layer on thermally oxidized Si substrate for spintronics applications.
- Author
-
Taparia, Dolly, Sasaki, Taisuke T., Nakatani, Tomoya, Suto, Hirofumi, Mitani, Seiji, and Sakuraba, Yuya
- Subjects
- *
HEUSLER alloys , *HARD disks , *GIANT magnetoresistance , *BUFFER layers , *SUBSTRATES (Materials science) - Abstract
To utilize highly spin-polarized Heusler alloys in practical spintronic devices, the realization of highly textured and structurally ordered polycrystalline thin films under limited annealing temperatures (TA) is critical. Compared to the natural [110]-texture of Heusler alloys, the [001]-texture is considered to be favorable for current-perpendicular-to-plane giant magnetoresistance devices due to the reduced lattice misfit with the face-centered-cubic Ag spacer layers. In this study, we fabricated [001]-oriented polycrystalline Co2FeGa0.5Ge0.5 (CFGG) Heusler alloy films epitaxially grown on a [001]-oriented polycrystalline Ag buffer layer on a thermally oxidized Si substrate, and the microstructure of the [001]-oriented Ag/CFGG bilayer film was investigated in detail. The [001]-oriented Ag films were obtained by introducing N2 into Ar during the sputtering process. The [001]-oriented CFGG films exhibited smooth interfaces, B2 ordering, and a high saturation magnetization close to the theoretical value under relatively low annealing at TA = 300 °C, which are critical for industrial applications such as read heads of hard disk drives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF