Characterizations of Electrodeposited NiCoFe Ternary Alloys: Influence of deposition potential Hilal Kuru 1 • Hakan Kockar 1 • Ozen Demirbas 1 • Mursel Alper 2 Received: 20 February 2015 / Accepted: 11 March 2015 / Published online: 19 March 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Microstructural, magnetoresistance and mag- netic properties of electrodeposited NiCoFe ternary alloys were investigated in terms of deposition potentials chang- ing from -1.8 to -3.0 V with respect to saturated calomel electrode. The alloys were grown on polycrystalline Tita- nium substrates. The potentials were obtained from cyclic voltammetry and the current–time transients were also recorded to control the growth of proper alloys. From the structural analysis by X-ray diffraction, all alloys had a face-centred cubic structure. The alloy compositions by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy revealed that the Ni content increases whereas the Co and Fe contents decrease as the deposition potential increase. And, the scanning electron microscope images disclosed that the alloy mor- phologies changed as the deposition potential changed. All alloys showed anisotropic magnetic resistance and their magnitudes were between 4.5 and 8.7 %. The vibrating sample magnetometer measurements showed that the saturation magnetization of the alloys increases from 748 to 786 emu/cm 3 and coercivity decreases from 28.7 to 25.9 Oe as the deposition potential increases. The easy axis of magnetization was found to be parallel to the film plane for all alloys. The variations in magnetic and magnetore- sistive properties related to the microstructure were at- tributed to the compositional changes caused by the deposition potential. 1 Introduction In recent years, because of the increasing utility in elec- tronic and energy conversion devices [1], the magnetic systems containing transition metal alloys and compounds with specific properties have been attracting interest for using them in computer read/write heads and microelec- tromechanical systems [2–5]. The purpose of the investi- gations was to produce magnetic alloys with desired magnetic and magnetoresistance properties. The properties necessary in these alloys are the highest saturation mag- netization and the lowest coercivity to increase storage density in magnetic media [4–6]. NiFe (permalloy), which presents interesting magnetic properties, is one of the most commonly used material in magnetic recording industry [1, 7, 8]. However, new materials with soft magnetic proper- ties which show higher performance are required since the storage density in computers increases dramatically by now and also it is necessary to make the miniaturization of the developed or novel devices [3]. For this reason, ternary NiCoFe alloy, which is a high magnetic moment material, might be a replacement for the electrodeposited permalloy which was extensively used for magnetic read-write heads [8]. Several physical techniques are used to produce this type of alloys to accomplish the aim. The methods such as molecular beam epitaxy or sputtering requires high vacuum condition to produce the alloys [9, 10]. Electrodeposition, which is used in this study, is a simple and economic & Hakan Kockar hkockar@balikesir.edu.tr Hilal Kuru htopcu@balikesir.edu.tr Ozen Demirbas hakankockar@hotmail.com Mursel Alper malper@uludag.edu.tr 1 Physics Department, Science and Literature Faculty, Balikesir University, 10145 Cagıs, Balikesir, Turkey 2 Physics Department, Science and Literature Faculty, Uludag University, 16059 Gorukle, Bursa, Turkey 123 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron (2015) 26:4046–4050 DOI 10.1007/s10854-015-2943-1