Effects of interfacial roughness on the planar Hall effect in NiFe/Cu/IrMn multilayers.

This paper reports that the planar Hall effect in NiFe/Cu/IrMn multilayers was strongly influenced by the Cu spacer thickness ( t), which was due to the variation of interfacial roughness. With t increasing, a peculiar change of planar Hall voltage was observed. The reason for the voltage behaviors was that the interfacial roughness influenced the spin-asymmetry of spin-polarized electrons in ferromagnetic metals. The diffuse scattering to the electrons turned to specular scattering when the interface became flat, leading to the variation of resistivity change (Δ ρ). As the increase in t, the extremum field was reduced because of the weaken exchange coupling between NiFe and IrMn layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]