Interfacial structure of Co/Pt multilayers

Abstract

We present a systematic method to characterize the solid/solid interfaces of the multilayers by measuring and analyzing the x-ray intensity distributions for the scattering vector Q parallel to the film plane near the first few superlattice diffraction peaks. For the 〈001〉 and 〈111〉 oriented Co/Pt multilayers grown by molecular-beam epitaxy, the total intensity was found to be dominated by the diffuse intensity, indicating that the interfaces are rough and are mostly correlated throughout the multilayers. By analyzing the peak shape and the Fourier transfer of the intensity distribution, we conclude that the interfacial height fluctuation function is qualitatively different between the two films with different orientations.