Magnetic properties of ferromagnetic FeCu ‘superlattices’ on Cu(100)

With respect to the parent lattice of fcc Cu the magnetic anisotropy energy of Cu(100)/(FeCu) n with n varying between 2 and 15 is investigated using the spin-polarized relativistic screened Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method. It is found that the anisotropy energy per repetition rapidly converges to a constant value of about 0.46meV, indicating that for a system of this kind, even for a much larger number of repetitions, the orientation of the magnetization remains perpendicular-to-plane (out-of-plane). For reasonably thick films discrete Fourier transformations of the layer-resolved magnetic moments and of the layer-resolved band energies with respect to atomic layers show a period of two, namely the number of atomic layers in each repeated unit.