Atomic-scale magnetic and chemical structure of Fe/V multilayers using Mossbauer spectroscopy -: art. no. 024407

The magnetic structure of Fe/V multilayers is investigated on the basis of Mossbauer spectroscopy, together with the theoretical modeling of sample growth and self-consistent calculations of magnetic moments on each atomic site for the systems with different intermixing at the interface. It is shown that the floating of atoms in upper layers during the epitaxial growth leads to the formation of asymmetric chemical and magnetic interfaces. This asymmetry can explain the difference between magnetic responses from Fe on V and V on Fe interfaces observed in experiments. Layer by layer magnetization of iron, induced magnetization of vanadium, and distribution of moments on the Fe atoms with given local environment are calculated for the structures with different intermixing. The Fe magnetic moments depend mainly on the number of nearest-neighbor V atoms. Comparison of magnetic hyperfine field distributions extracted from Mossbauer spectra and calculated distributions of magnetic moments supports the assumption about their proportionality in these multilayers.