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With a view to fabricating future flexible electronic devices, an atmospheric-pressure plasma jet driven by 13.56 MHz radio-frequency power is developed for depositing Cu thin films on polyimide, where a Cu wire inserted inside the quartz tube was used as the evaporation source. A polyimide substrate is placed on a water-cooled copper heat sink to prevent it from being thermally damaged. With the aim of preventing oxidation of the deposited Cu film, we investigated the effect of adding H2 to Ar plasma on film characteristics. Theoretical fitting of the OH emission line in OES spectrum revealed that adding H2 gas significantly increased the rotational temperature roughly from 800 to 1500 K. The LMM Auger spectroscopy analysis revealed that higher-purity Cu films were synthesized on polyimide by adding hydrogen gas. A possible explanation for the enhancement in the Cu film deposition rate and improvement of purity of Cu films by H2 gas addition is that atomic hydrogen produced by the plasma plays important roles in heating the gas to promote the evaporation of Cu atoms from the Cu wire and removing oxygen from copper oxide components via reduction reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CoO/Fe thin films were grown epitaxially onto vicinal Ag(001) and investigated using magneto-optic Kerr effect, x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD), and x-ray magnetic linear dichroism (XMLD) techniques. We show that the CoO film in the ultrathin regime does not induce a uniaxial magnetic anisotropy but a coercivity enhancement. This result provides a mechanism for the microscopic origin of the rotatable magnetic anisotropy. XMLD measurement further reveals that the underlying mechanism is that the CoO spins are totally rotatable in the ultrathin regime to follow the Fe magnetization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistive switching (RS) characteristics of a Pr0.7Ca0.3MnO3 (PCMO) film sandwiched between a Pt bottom electrode and top electrodes (TE) made of various metals are found to belong to two categories. Devices with TE made of Al, Ti, and Ta exhibit a large I-V hysteresis loop and bipolar RS, but those with TE made of Pt, Ag, Au, and Cu do not. Transmission electron microscopy reveals that a thin metal-oxide layer formed at the interface between the former group of TE and PCMO, but not for the latter group of TE. Analysis shows that the categorization depends on the Gibbs free energy of oxidation of the TEs with respect to that of PCMO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]