Effect of interfacial roughness on the phase of quantum well states in Cu/Co(001) and Cu/Ni(001) systems

It is known that the quantum well (QW) states in magneticlayered structures can be well described by a phase accumulation model(PAM) in which the phase is calculated by assuming a perfectly sharpinterface. In order to verify the validity of this assumption, we studiedthe effect of interfacial mixing on the phase of QW states inCo/Cu/Co(001) and Co/Cu/Ni(001) systems. By controlling the annealingtime, we progressively increased the interfacial mixing on these films.While the interlayer oscillatory coupling changes upon annealing, thecoupling peak positions remain unchanged. This result suggests that thephase of the QW states have little dependence on the interfacialmixing.