Effect of interface structure correlation on magnetoresistance of Fe/Cr multilayers

Effect of interfacial roughness on giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in Fe/Cr m ultilayers has been studied. A set of samples is prepared by simultaneously depositing on a set of float-glass (FG) substrates with varying rms surfac e roughness. This causes the correlated part of the rms roughness to vary f rom sample to sample. Another set of specimen is irradiated with 200 MeV Ag ions in order to induce uncorrelated roughness at the interfaces. In both the cases morphological and other microstructural features of different mul tilayers remained similar, thus allowing one to separate the effect of inte rface roughness from that of morphological changes. GMR measurements on the se multilayers show that increasing interfacial roughness causes GMR to dec rease nonlinearly. It is found that the effect of uncorrelated part of the roughness is much stronger than that of the correlated part. (C) 2001 Elsev ier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.