Quantitative comparison of the magnetic proximity effect in Pt detected by XRMR and XMCD

TL;DR

This study compares XRMR and XMCD techniques for measuring the magnetic proximity effect in platinum, demonstrating their quantitative agreement and validating XRMR as a reliable method for analyzing spin depth profiles at magnetic interfaces.

Contribution

It provides a systematic quantitative comparison of XRMR and XMCD on the same samples, confirming XRMR's reliability for spintronic interface analysis.

Findings

XRMR and XMCD results are in very good agreement.

XRMR provides reliable spin depth profiles.

Quantitative analysis confirms XRMR's effectiveness.

Abstract

X-ray resonant magnetic reflectivity (XRMR) allows for the simultaneous measurement of structural, optical and magnetooptic properties and depth profiles of a variety of thin film samples. However, a same-beamtime same-sample systematic quantitative comparison of the magnetic properties observed with XRMR and x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) is still pending. Here, the XRMR results (Pt L$_{3}$ absorption edge) for the magnetic proximity effect in Pt deposited on the two different ferromagnetic materials Fe and Co$_{33}$Fe$_{67}$ are compared with quantitatively analyzed XMCD results. The obtained results are in very good quantitative agreement between the absorption-based (XMCD) and reflectivity-based (XRMR) techniques taking into account an ab initio calculated magnetooptic conversion factor for the XRMR analysis. Thus, it is shown that XRMR provides quantitative reliable spin depth profiles important for spintronic and spin caloritronic transport phenomena at this type of magnetic interfaces.