Structure and magnetic properties of metastable Ni/bcc-Fe multilayers

Ni/bcc-Fe(001) multilayers have been grown by means of MBE. RHEED and X-ray diffraction patterns indicate that the structure of 3ML Ni on bcc-Fe(001) is “bct”, instead of an expected bcc structure. The magnetic moment of bct-Ni is evaluated as 0.8 µ B at 4.5 K, where we assume that the moment of Fe is equivalent to that of bulk Fe. The band calculation of the multilayer indicates that the observed enhancement is due to the enhanced moments of Ni and Fe at the interface.