SHG anisotropy in Au/Co/Au/Cu/vicinal Si(111)

Abstract The second harmonic generation (SHG) reflectivity on magnetic multilayers is a very sensitive technique to reveal the crystallography of buried interfaces. We have used the azimuthal anisotropy of SHG to demonstrate that the vicinal character of Si(1 1 1) substrate is duplicated in the metallic multilayer Au/Co/Au/Cu. The magnetic properties of these multilayers as anisotropy and magneto-optic polar Kerr rotation were studied by linear magneto-optic effects in correlation with SHG experiments, by varying the Co and Au buffer thicknesses as well as the Cu buffer deposition condition.