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A comprehensive analysis of the electrical current passing through the tip-substrate junction during oxidation of silicon by scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is presented. This analysis of experimental results under dc-bias conditions resolves the role of electronic and ionic contributions, especially for the initial stages of the reaction, determines the effective contact area of the tip-substrate junction, and unifies the roles of space charge and meniscus formation. In Part I of this work, we demonstrate that SPM oxidation is governed by a maximum charge density generated by electronic species within the junction at the onset of the oxidation process. Excess charge is channeled into lateral diffusion, keeping the charge density within the reaction zone constant and reducing the aspect ratio of the resulting oxide features. A uniform charge density implies that SPM oxides contain a fixed defect concentration, in accordance with the space-charge model. The effective (electrical) thickness of SPM oxides de...

A comprehensive analysis of the electrical current passing through the tip-substrate junction during oxidation of silicon by scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is presented. This analysis identifies the electronic and ionic contributions to the total current, especially at the initial stages of the reaction, determines the effective contact area of the tip-substrate junction, and unifies the roles of space charge and meniscus formation. In this work, we concentrate on noncontact SPM oxidation. We analyze simultaneous force-distance and current-distance curves to demonstrate that total current flow during noncontact oxidation is significantly less for noncontact mode than for contact oxidation, although the resulting oxide volume is nearly identical. Ionization of water layers and mobile charge reorganization prior to and following meniscus formation is also shown to alter the tip-substrate capacitance and, therefore, the bending of the SPM cantilever.

Dynamic magnetic properties of epitaxial MnAs thin films are studied by means of Brillouin light scattering (BLS). The sharp spectral peaks of the inelastic BLS are observed in room temperature, which are attributed to surface spin waves indicating the long-wavelength collective behavior of ferromagnetic spins. The field dependence of the surface spin-wave frequency is strongly affected by an in-plane angle between the crystal axis and the external field direction in a GaAs(100)/MnAs(-1100) film, which originates from uniaxial magnetic anisotropy parallel to the MnAs[11-20] axis and the modified g value. Significant damping of the spin-wave BLS spectrum is observed with increasing excitation laser power, possibly due to thermal effects.

CoCr films were deposited on three types of GaAs substrates, GaAs(001), GaAs(111), and Al oxide∕GaAs(001). The perpendicular magnetic properties were investigated by magneto-optical Kerr-effect measurements. The direct deposition of the CoCr film on the GaAs substrate did not show any perpendicular magnetic properties. This fact indicates that the lattice distortion influenced by the GaAs lattice suppresses the perpendicular magnetism. The CoCr film on the Al oxide layer showed a tilted squarelike hysteresis loop. The thickness dependence of the hysteresis loop and the magnetic force microscopy showed that the onset thickness of ferromagnetism was 6.5nm. The domain size of the CoCr films monotonously decreases with the increasing thickness (6.5–75nm).