Thickness dependence of Fe<inf>3</inf>O<inf>4</inf>/MgO thin film properties: Density functional theory investigation

Abstract

In this work, the thickness dependence of Fe3O4(111)/MgO thin films, were simulated using density-functional theory. From the results, even though the total DOS in bulk structure presents a half-metallic behavior, the DOS of all Fe3O4(111) films demonstrates that they are metallic. The specific magnetization as a function of film thickness is found to satisfy the inverse power law. Indeed, the noncompensation of spin moments is also observed to be the main majority effect in the enhancement of giant magnetization. Moreover, the high spin polarization value is discovered in the compensation models and tends to reach-80% with increasing the thickness. © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.