Structural and magnetic properties of NiMnSb/InGaAs/InP(001)

Abstract

The structural and magnetic properties of NiMnSb films, 5-120 nm thick, grown on InGaAs/InP(001) substrates by molecular-beam epitaxy, were studied by x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) techniques. X-ray diffraction and TEM studies show that the NiMnSb films had the expected half-Heusler structure, and films up to 120 nm were pseudomorphically strained at the interface, greater than the critical thickness for this system, about 70 nm (0.6% mismatch to InP). No interfacial misfit dislocations were detected up to 85 nm, however, relaxation in the surface regions of films thicker than 40 nm was evident in x-ray reciprocal space maps. TEM investigations show that bulk, planar defects are present beginning in the thinnest film (10 nm). Their density remains constant but they gradually increase in size with increasing film thickness. By 40 nm these defects have overlapped to form a quasicontinuous network aligned closely with < 100 > in-plane directions. The associated strain fields and or compositional ordering from these defects introduced a reduction in crystal symmetry that influenced the magnetic properties. The in-plane and perpendicular FMR anisotropies are not well described by bulk and interface contributions. In thick films, the in-plane uniaxial and fourfold anisotropies increased with increasing film thickness. The lattice defects resulted in a large extrinsic magnetic damping caused by two-magnon scattering, an increase in the coersive field with increasing film thickness, and a lower magnetic moment (3.6 Bohr magnetons) compared to the expected value for the bulk crystals (4 Bohr magnetons). (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics