Correlation of Crystalline and Electronic Structure in Epitaxial FCC-Cobalt Monolayers on Cu(100)

Abstract

Initiated by the need for improved magnetic recording media, recently the ferromagnetism of low-dimensional systems has received wide interest. A layered system may be realized by epitaxially growing films of a ferromagnetic material on top of a suitable non-magnetic substrate. The magnetism of these systems, however, is strongly determined by the electronic structure of the films which in turn depends on their crystalline structure. The knowledge of this correlation is of major importance in the understanding of the magnetic properties of ultrathin films (being a necessary basis for successful technological application). The task to characterize the crystalline and electronic structure may be accomplished by a combination of in situ LEED and angle-resolved photoemission (ARUPS) experiments. Ambiguities in the classification of majority and minority spin states in a ferromagnet (being immanent to the conventional spin-integrated ARUPS method) can only be avoided by including a spin-polarization analysis of the photoelectrons. The present contribution outlines exemplarily the interplay of crystalline and electronic structure in the model system fcc-Cobalt on Cu(100) by means of the approach sketched above.