Spin polarized photoemission studies of interfacial and thin film magnetism

Spin polarized photoemission is used to study the electronic structure of noble metals deposited on ferromagnetic substrates. Studies of Ag deposited on an Fe(001) substrate reveal a series of minority spin interface or quantum well states with binding energies dependent on the thickness of the silver. Similar behavior is observed for Cu films deposited on a fct Co(001) substrate. Tight-binding modeling reproduces many of the observations and shows that hybridization of the sp-bands with the noble metal d-bands cannot be ignored.