Magnetic Metal Films on Semiconductor Substrates

Abstract

Over the past decade, the growth of interest in magnetic metal films has been enormous, as the topics in these two volumes show. This stems from three different developments which converged during the 1980s. First, ultra high vacuum techniques were developed to carefully grow and characterize single crystal films on single crystal substrates. This field has come to be generally called “Molecular Beam Epitaxy”, a term taken over from the semiconductor community. Although not strictly true for the deposition of elemental metal films, the term is nevertheless widely used and accepted in the magnetic metal film community, since the deposition sources, procedures, techniques and indeed the “MBE machines” themselves, are essentially the same. [See Appendix for a discussion of MBE techniques]. The second development was in spinpolarized electron techniques to study these new materials. These have given rise to a lexicon of “Spin-polarized” prefixed names, such as spin-polarized photo-emission, spin-polarized electron energy loss spectroscopy, spin-polarized electron microscopy, etc. These topics are discussed in detail in Volume I. Finally, the advent of the supercomputers permitted considerable progress in computational physics and specifically in the direct calculation of the electronic structure of single crystal magnetic metal slabs of finite thickness. The circle was thus closed and atomic scale structures could be grown, characterized and modeled.