Influence of fabrication parameters on the magnetic and structural properties of Mn₅Ge₃

Abstract

The Mn5Ge3 is a ferromagnetic material with the high potential for spintronic applications. Usually, it is grown by conventional solid states reaction of manganese with germanium using molecular beam epitaxy. Here, we report the structural and magnetic properties of Mn5Ge3 layers grown on Ge substrates using ultrafast-solid phase epitaxy (SPE) method. We investigate the influence of the substrate orientation, Mn layer thickness and annealing parameters on the crystallographic orientation and magnetization of Mn5Ge3. It is shown that after millisecond range SPE, Mn5Ge3 films always have a preferred (100) orientation whether grown on Ge (001) or (111) substrates, which determines the orientation of the magnetization easy axis lying in the film plane along c axis independent of the layer thickness. The Curie temperature of Mn5Ge3 is weakly dependent of fabrication parameters.