Abstract
We report on thin film bilayers of the antiferromagnetic Heusler compound Ru2MnGe and Fe, as well as the resulting exchange bias field at low temperatures and its temperature dependence. Epitaxial Ru2MnGe/Fe bilayers show an exchange bias field up to 680 Oe at 3 K. For increasing temperatures, a linearly decreasing exchange bias field is found, which vanishes at 130 K. Furthermore, we grew polycrystalline Ru2MnGe showing an exchange bias field up to 540 Oe, which vanishes around 30 K. By adding a very thin intermediate layer of Mn, the exchange bias field for polycrystalline samples has been increased by about 40%. We discuss differences between the epitaxial and polycrystalline films regarding magnetic and crystallographic properties and compare our results to already published work on this system.
Highlights
With the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in the late 1980s by Fert and Gr€unberg,1,2 the interest in the field of spinelectronics rapidly increased
We report on thin film bilayers of the antiferromagnetic Heusler compound Ru2MnGe and Fe, as well as the resulting exchange bias field at low temperatures and its temperature dependence
By adding a very thin intermediate layer of Mn, the exchange bias field for polycrystalline samples has been increased by about 40%
Summary
With the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in the late 1980s by Fert and Gr€unberg, the interest in the field of spinelectronics rapidly increased. Commonly used devices, e.g., in today’s hard disc drive read heads, or a future magnetic, fast and nonvolatile memory, rely on a ferromagnetic (FM) reference material that needs to be coupled to an antiferromagnet (AFM). The most commonly used antiferromagnet is IrMn, due to its high thermal stability and corrosion resistance.. We present a study on the Heusler compound Ru2MnGe, which is known to have an antiferromagnetic ground state by theory and experiment.. In particular, interesting due to their high diversity of properties. As shown by Fukatani et al in Ref. 10, at liquid nitrogen temperature, tRMG 1⁄4 10 nm leads to the largest exchange bias field. Additional samples we prepared with tRMG 1⁄4 20 and 30 nm showed no larger exchange bias fields, all further samples were prepared with tRMG 1⁄4 10 nm
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