Thin films MnGe grown on Si(111)

Abstract

MnGe has been grown as a thin film on Si(111) substrates by molecular beam epitaxy. A 10 Å layer of MnSi was used as seedlayer in order to establish the B20 crystal structure. Films of a thickness between 45 and 135 Å have been prepared and structually characterized by RHEED, AFM and XRD. These techniques give evidence that MnGe forms in the cubic B20 crystal structure as islands exhibiting a very smooth surface. The islands become larger with increasing film thickness. A magnetic characterization reveals that the ordering temperature of MnGe thin films is enhanced compared to bulk material. The properties of the helical magnetic structure obtained from magnetization and magnetoresistivity measurements are compared with films of the related compound MnSi. The much larger Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in MnGe results in a higher rigidness of the spin helix.

5 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Skyrmion Lattice in a Chiral Magnet
• Spontaneous Skyrmion Ground States in Magnetic Metals
• Topological Hall effect in the A-phase of MnSi
• Robust formation of skyrmions and topological Hall effect in epitaxial thin films of MnSi
• Stabilization of Skyrmion textures by uniaxial distortions in noncentrosymmetric cubic helimagnets
• Extended elliptic skyrmion gratings in epitaxial MnSi thin films

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Chiral skyrmions in cubic helimagnet films: the role of uniaxial anisotropy
• Atomic scale visualization of topological spin textures in the chiral magnet MnGe
• Molecular Beam Epitaxy Growth of [CrGe/MnGe/FeGe] Superlattices: Toward Artificial B20 Skyrmion Materials with Tunable Interactions
• Engineering Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in B20 thin film chiral magnets
• Structure and magnetism of MnGe thin films grown with a nonmagnetic CrSi template