Nanoscale Fe islands on MgO(001) produced by molecular-beam epitaxy

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We report that a 10-nm thick Fe film grown at an elevated temperature on MgO(001) forms isolated islands of diameter between 10 and 100 nm. Increasing the deposition temperature causes the islands to decrease in diameter. The resulting films are electrically insulating but show electrical transport properties that vary strongly with growth temperature when capped with 2 nm Au. Films grown at a temperature of 743 K showed a giant magnetoresistance of 0.7% when measured at room temperature.