Structural and magnetic properties of sputtered FePd thin films grown on MgO single-crystal substrates with oblique and normal substrate orientation

Published

July 28, 2020

Author(s)

Xinjun Wang, Sergiy Krylyuk, Daniel Josell, Daniel Gopman, Jian-Ping Wang, Delin Zhang

Abstract

Materials possessing perpendicular magnetic anisotropy derived from the intrinsic crystal structure, such as in L10 Fe-based alloys, have the potential to deliver superior scaling of magnetic memory elements compared to materials whose anisotropy is derived from surfaces and interfaces. Controlling the high-quality L10 FePd can be realized by using different substrates, deposition temperatures, pressures, seed/buffer layers, etc. Another relevant parameter to engineer L10 (001) crystallization in sputtered Fe-Pd thin films is the angle of inclination between the substrate and the sputtering target. In this work, we deposited Cr(15 nm)/Pt(Ir, Ru) (4 nm)/FePd (8 nm)/Ru(2 nm)/Ta(3 nm) with the FePd layer grown either using oblique (a 30 degree tilt from the sputtering target) and normal (target facing) magnetron sputtering. X-ray diffraction, ferromagnetic resonance spectroscopy and vibrating sample magnetometry were measured to compare the degree of L10 order and static and dynamic properties of films deposited under normal versus oblique inclination. We find that the films grown under the 30 degree oblique inclination exhibit a stronger degree of L10 orientation, a larger perpendicular magnetic anisotropy field and lower Gilbert damping, indicating that the resulting microstructure induced by inclined deposition yields better functional magnetic properties for the films across all three buffer layer materials.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Magnetics

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, MRAM, FePd, Gilbert damping

Citation

Wang, X. , Krylyuk, S. , Josell, D. , Gopman, D. , Wang, J. and Zhang, D. (2020), Structural and magnetic properties of sputtered FePd thin films grown on MgO single-crystal substrates with oblique and normal substrate orientation, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=930184 (Accessed January 16, 2025)