Study of ion beam sputtered Fe/Si interfaces as a function of Si layer thickness

Abstract

The exchange interaction in metal/semiconductor interfaces is far from being completely understood. Therefore, in this paper, we have investigated the nature of silicon on the Fe interface in the ion beam deposited Fe/Si/Fe trilayers keeping the thickness of the Fe layers fixed at 3 nm and varying the thickness of the silicon sandwich layer from 1.5 nm to 4 nm. Grazing incidence x-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy techniques were used, respectively, to study the structural and morphological changes in the deposited films as a function of layer thickness. The structural studies show silicide formation at the interfaces during deposition and better crystalline structure of Fe layers at a lower spacer layer thickness. The magnetization behavior was investigated using magneto-optical Kerr effect, which clearly shows that coupling between the ferromagnetic layers is highly influenced by the semiconductor spacer layer thickness. A strong antiferromagnetic coupling was observed for a value of tSi = 2.5 nm but above this value an unexpected behavior of hysteresis loop (step like) with two coercivity values is recorded. For spacer layer thickness greater than 2.5 nm, an elemental amorphous Si layer starts to appear in the spacer layer in addition to the silicide layer at the interfaces. It is observed that in the trilayer structure, Fe layers consist of various stacks, viz., Si doped Fe layers, ferromagnetic silicide layer, and nonmagnetic silicide layer at the interfaces. The two phase hysteresis loop is explained on the basis of magnetization reversal of two ferromagnetic layers, independent of each other, with different coercivities. X-ray photo electron spectroscopy technique was also used to study interfaces characteristics as a function of tSi.