We have studied the thickness dependence of the structural and magnetic properties of ultrathin Fe3Si films grown on GaAs(001). The onset of ferromagnetism is found to be at about 3 ML at low temperatures. Furthermore, a reorientation of the uniaxial in-plane magnetic anisotropy takes place when the thickness of the films is reduced. This is due to a competition between a volume term and an interface contribution, which have opposite sign. Whereas the origin of the volume term remains unclear, the interface contribution is attributted to an anisotropic bonding at the Fe3Si∕GaAs(001) interface, similar to other ferromagnet/semiconductor hybrid structures.
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Herfort et al. (2008) studied this question.
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