HREM study of heteroepitaxial interfaces in the Ni.50Co.50O/Al2MgO4(100) system
Epitaxial CoO/NiO multilayers and alloys have been produced which show interesting structural and magnetic properties. Typically, epitaxial films are grown either by chemical vapor deposition or evaporation. However, sputtering can also yield high quality epitaxial films. The structure of the substrate and the interface of the film/substrate are critical factors to determine the quality of the epitaxial film. The CoO/NiO epitaxial films on the α-Al2O3 had been studied extensively in our previous work. In this paper, the heteroepitaxial interface in the Ni.50Co.50O/Al2MgO4 is studied by using high resolution electron microscopy. Transmission electron microscopy was performed using the JEOL-200CX and JEOL-ARM1000 microscopes at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Berkeley.