Hossein Raanaei

A series of Fe/MgO multilayers was grown on single-crystal MgO(001) substrates at differenttemperatures using magnetron sputtering. The structural quality of the samples was nvestigated by x-ray reflectometry, x-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. The results show a strong dependence of the structural quality on the growth temperature. Although good epitaxial layers are obtained at 165 ?C, the sample does not exhibit any superlattice diffraction peaks. This effect is shown to be related to a continuous variation of the distance between theFe layers as well as between the MgO layers.