Growth of YIG films by solid phase epitaxy and their properties

Abstract

For epitaxial growth of YIG films by sputtering, methods of both direct growth and solid phase epitaxy (SPE) were used. However, it was very hard to sputter at high temperature for the direct growth of epitaxial YIG films. Instead, the SPE is a very useful and easy method for growing YIG epitaxial films. It was very effective to add a small amount of oxygen to suppress the formation of the YFeO3 phase in the SPE. The crystallization temperature of the Fe–Y–O amorphous films on GGG (111) substrate was much lower than that of Fe–Y–O powder. An excellent epitaxial growth of YIG films could be confirmed with XRD by both very high intensities and very low values of the full width at half maximum of the YIG (888) plane. It could be seen that it is necessary to anneal the films at higher temperature for excellent epitaxy. The films annealed at higher temperature shows M–H loops with perpendicular anisotropy which was due to 0.15% lattice mismatch between YIG and GGG. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)