Low-temperature growth of fully epitaxial CoFe/Ge/Fe3Si layers on Si for vertical-type semiconductor spintronic devices

Abstract

We develop a low-temperature growth technique of epitaxial Ge layers on a body-centered-cubic ferromagnetic metal (bcc-FM), Fe3Si, by combining solid phase epitaxy (SPE) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The insertion of an SPE-grown Ge layer enables two-dimensional epitaxial growth of Ge layers by MBE even at a growth temperature of ∼175 C. Thanks to the relatively flat surface of the Ge epilayers, we can obtain an epitaxial CoFe (bcc-FM) layer on top of the Ge layers, leading to the all-epitaxial CoFe/Ge/Fe3Si trilayer with a reasonable magnetization reversal process. We believe that the all-epitaxial CoFe/Ge/Fe3Si trilayer has great potential to be utilized as novel vertical-type Ge-channel spintronic devices.