The preparation of Zn-ferrite epitaxial thin film from epitaxial Fe 3O 4:ZnO multilayers by ion beam sputtering deposition

Abstract

A new method to grow a well-ordered epitaxial ZnFe 2O 4 thin film on Al 2O 3(0001) substrate is described in this work. The samples were made by annealing the ZnO/Fe 3O 4 multilayer which was grown with low energy ion beam sputtering deposition. Both the Fe 3O 4 and ZnO layers were found grown epitaxially at low temperature and an epitaxial ZnFe 2O 4 thin film was formed after annealing at 1000 °C. X-ray diffraction shows the ZnFe 2O 4 film is grown with an orientation of ZnFe 2O 4(111)//Al 2O 3(0001) and ZnFe 2O 4(1–10)//Al 2O 3(11–20). X-ray absorption spectroscopy studies show that Zn 2+ atoms replace the tetrahedral Fe 2+ atoms in Fe 3O 4 during the annealing. The magnetic properties measured by vibrating sample magnetometer show that the saturation magnetization of ZnFe 2O 4 grown from ZnO/Fe 3O 4 multilayer reaches the bulk value after the annealing process.