Anomalous Grazing-Incidence X-ray Reflection

Abstract

The production of multi-layered thin films such as those of Co/Cu with sufficient reliability is well recognized as a key technology for device fabrication in micro-electronics, because of their characteristic gigantic magnetoresistance and antiferro- and ferro-magnetic oscillation behaviors as a function of the thickness of the layers of the non-magnetic component [1, 2]. These interesting properties of new synthetic functional materials should be attributed to their periodic and interfacial structures at a microscopic level, although the origin of such peculiar feature of multi-layers is not well identified yet. This includes knowledge of the surface structure and the number density of atoms in the near-surface region of the desired materials. On the other hand, knowledge of the structural properties of surfaces and interfaces of materials is a prerequisite to countless applications originating from physics, chemistry and engineering. This demand has been satisfied by the availability of a large variety of surface-specific experimental methods. For example, electron diffraction techniques such as RHEED are often used for the surface analysis because of their inherent surface sensitivity due to the strong interaction between electrons and atoms. However, the limitation of these techniques is that some tedious experimental conditions, such as ultra-high vacuum and elaborate sample preparations, are required.