Comparing study of magnetic properties of Co–CeO₂ thin films with (111) and (100) preferred orientations

Abstract

In recent years, diluted magnetic oxides (DMOs) have been intensively studied aiming for using for spin injection and transportation. In this paper, DMOs of cobalt doped CeO 2 (CCO) films with varied cobalt content (0-10%) were fabricated on Al 2 O 3 (0001) substrates by both pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and magnetron sputtering respectively. Pulsed laser deposited and sputtered CCO films showed CeO 2 (111) and (100) preferred orientations respectively. These two types of films with different crystallinity had almost the same magnetic and magneto-optical properties, such as room temperature ferromagnetism, non-linearly dependent of the moments on cobalt content, anisotropic magnetisation with an easy axis in out of plane direction and giant Faraday effect. The largest Faraday rotation value of y4500u cm 21 at 650 nm wavelength was obtained, for both PLD and magnetron sputtered films. The successful fabrication of ferromagnetic CCO films with controllable preferred orientations on Al 2 O 3 (0001) substrates would be useful to facilitate epitaxial multilayered thin film devices fabrication.