Ferromagnetic resonance studies of very thin epitaxial single crystals of iron

Abstract

Ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) has been used to study a wide variety of very thin single crystals of Fe grown on (110) GaAs substrates by molecular beam epitaxy. Data were taken at room and liquid nitrogen temperatures for films with thicknesses L in the range 18–200 Å. Due to surface anisotropy, the easy axis of the magnetization switches from [100] to [110] when L≤50 Å, independent of whether the the film surface is passivated by an Al-overcoat or has a thin Fe oxide surface layer. We suggest that this is an effective surface anisotropy arising in part from a depth dependent strain near the film-substrate interface. The changes in the parameters describing the angular dependence of the FMR spectra upon cooling to 77 K can be explained as due to magnetostriction arising from thermally induced strains plus the temperature dependence of the cubic volume anisotropy. The FMR linewidth is shown to be a linear function of frequency in the range 5–40 GHz.