Application of DAFS Spectroscopy to Study the Variations of Fe local structure in a Fe/Ir(100) Superlattice

Superlattice studies are important to synthesise 3d metals in new crystalline structure which may exhibit exotic magnetic properties. The challenge is to relate these properties to the details of the chemical gradient and the local strain. We report here on the use of Diffraction Anomalous Fine Structure (DAFS) spectroscopy to separate the XAFS-like information about Fe atoms located at different crystallographic sites of an Fe/Ir(100) superlattice. We obtained the Fe nearest neighbor distances at the Ir-Fe interfaces by the use of a new crystallographic-based analysis of the DAFS data.