Effect of Interface Roughness on GMR in Fe/Cr Multilayers

Effect of interfacial roughness on Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) in Fe/Cr multilayers has been studied by simultaneously depositing multilayers on a set of float glass substrates prepared with varying rms surface roughness. Morphological and other microstructural features of different multilayers are similar except for the interfacial roughness, thus allowing one to separate out the effect of interface roughness. GMR measurements on these multilayers show that increasing interfacial roughness causes GMR to decrease nonlinearly. GMR tends to saturate to a constant value for higher interfacial roughnesses because of the fact that different multilayers differ mainly in the correlated part of interfacial roughness.