Even though in its first years the IMM focused its research activities in III-V semiconductor epitaxy and applications, they rapidly spread to different areas of investigation of fundamental and technological relevance to the society. This way, the activity on nanomagnetism begun in 1995, when a new UHV system for sputter deposition of magnetic nanostructures started to be designed and set up. The first scientific results of the research line, focused on the epitaxy and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of binary alloys, appeared published two years later (1997) 1.
Since then, the results within this research activity have given rise to over 70 scientific articles papers, a similar number of communications in international conferences, 4 PhD thesis and a number of regional, national and European projects carried out.
Regarding the specific topics of research, a common link throughout these 11 years of work has been the effort correlating structure and magnetism in different epitaxial magnetic systems. We have covered for example studies in:
- Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and Magneto Optical activity in epitaxial binary alloys (Collaboration with IBM Almaden Research Center, R.F.C.Farrow, M.F.Toney, D.Weller) 2.
- Magnetic storage media (Collaboration with UNAXIS).
- Magnetization reversal in epitaxial ultrathin magnetic films 3.
- Magnetic anisotropy, reversal and Diffracted MOKE in arrays of magnetic nanoentities 4.
- Tunnel Magnetorresistance in fully epitaxial TM/MgO/TM magnetic tunnel junctions (Collaboration with Thales-CNRS, 2007 Nobel laureate in physics Albert Fert) 5.
- Magnetic interactions and capping layer effects in self assembled ferromagnetic nanoparticles 6.
1 P.Caro et al., J. Appl. Phys. 81, 5050 (1997).
2 G.Armelles et al., J. Appl. Phys. 82, 4449 (1997). A.Cebollada, R.F.C.Farrow and
M.F.Toney.“Structure and magnetic properties of magnetic transition metal binary alloys.”In “Advances in Nanophase Materials and
Nanotechnology” (Vol. Nanostructured Magnetic Materials). Ed. by S. Bandyopadhayay and H.S.Nalwa.American Scientific Publishers.
Stevenson Ranch, CA (2002) 93-118.
3 J.L.Costa-Krämer et al., J. Mag. Mag. Mater. 210/1-3, 341 (2000).
4 J.L.Costa-Krämer et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 76, 3091 (2000).
5 M.Bowen et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 79 , 1655 (2001).
6 E. Navarro et al. , Phys. Rev. B 69 , 224419 (2004).
