Room temperature biaxial magnetic anisotropy in La0.67Sr0.33MnO3 thin films on SrTiO3 buffered MgO (001) substrates for spintronic applications
© 2018 Author(s). This article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License ; Spintronics exploits the magnetoresistance effects to store or sense the magnetic information. Since the magnetoresistance strictly depends on the magnetic anisotropy of a system, it is fundamental to set a defined anisotropy to the system. Here, we investigate half-metallic La0.67Sr0.33MnO3 thin films by means of vectorial Magneto-Optical Kerr Magnetometry and found that they exhibit pure biaxial magnetic anisotropy at room temperature if grown onto a MgO (001) substrate with a thin SrTiO3 buffer. In this way, we can avoid unwanted uniaxial magnetic anisotropy contributions that may be detrimental for specific applications. The detailed study of the angular evolution of the magnetization reversal pathways and critical fields (coercivity and switching) discloses the origin of the magnetic anisotropy, which is magnetocrystalline in nature and shows fourfold symmetry at any temperature ; S.K.C. acknowledges Programme International de Coopération Scientifique (PICS) du CNRS under Grant No. 6161 and SIMEM Doctoral School at Universite de Caen Normandie for financial support. IMDEA-Nanociencia acknowledges support from the "Severo Ochoa" Program for Centres of Excellence in R&D (MINECO, Grant No. SEV-2016-0686). F.A., J.C., and P.P. acknowledge the support of Spanish MINECO Project Nos. FIS2015-67287-P and FIS2016-78591-C3-1-R and the Comunidad de Madrid through Project NANOFRONTMAG CM. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement Nos. 737116 (byAxon) and 654360 NFFA-Europe