Cutting of a thin epitaxial iron film into low dimensional structures by dislocation engineering

Abstract

The “Atomic saw” method, initially developed for semiconductor heterostructures, has been successfully used to fabricate low dimensional iron structures. Dislocations, generated by plastic deformation, are used to cut a 2 nm iron film, epitaxially grown onto a (001) MgO substrate, into one dimensional iron structures (called “stripes”) or zero dimensional structures (called “boxes”). Atomic force microscopy observations of the created magnetic structures demonstrate the applicability of this simple method. A statistical analysis of these observations quantifies the distributions of the widths and the shifts of the created adjacent stripes and reveals that these two parameters can be controlled by the choice of the plastic strain.