• Journal of the Korean Magnetics Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.147-153
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• 2008

It has been well-known that the Fe/GaAs heterostructure has a small lattice mismatch of 1.4% between Fe and GaAs, and the Fe layer is grown epitaxially on the the GaAs substrate. There are rich physics are observed in the GaAs/Fe interface, and the spininjection is actively studied due to its potential applications for spintronics devices. We fabricated Fe wedge layer in the thickness range $0{\sim}3.4$ nm on the GaAs(100) surface with 5-nm thick Au capping layer. The magnetic anisotropy of the Fe/GaAs system was investigated by employing Brillouin light scattering(BLS) measurements in this study. The spin wave excitation of Fe layer was studied as the function of intensity and the in-plane angle of external magnetic field, and thickness of Fe layer. Also these various dependences were analyzed with analytic expression of spin wave surface mode in order to determine the magnetic anisotropies. It has been found that the GaAs/Fe/Au system has additional uniaxial magnetic anisotropy, while the bulk Fe has biaxial anisotropy. The uniaxial anisotropy shows increasing dependency respected to decreasing thickness of Fe layer while biaxial anisotropy is reduced with Fe film thickness. This result allows the analysis that the uniaxial anisotropy is originated from interface between GaAs surface and Fe layer.