X-ray diffraction and ferromagnetic resonance study of sputtered (110) GaAs/Fe epitaxial films

A series of epitaxial (110) Fe films with thicknesses from 5 to 164 nm were deposited on (110) GaAs substrates by rf magnetron sputtering. X-ray diffraction pole figures, in-plane phi-scan measurements, and ferromagnetic resonance linewidths show decreasing crystal quality with increasing thickness. In-plane and out-of-plane theta-2theta scans show a tensile stress decreasing with film thickness. Magnetic crystalline anisotropy and effective in-plane uniaxial anisotropy values were obtained from calculations of the free energy of a (110) cubic crystal and curve fitting of resonance measurements. The quality of the films thinner than 84 nm is close to the reported values of single crystal (110) Fe films deposited by molecular-beam epitaxy systems. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.