Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics (2019) 30:17879–17889 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-019-02140-z Efect of NiFe layer thickness on properties of NiFe/Cu superlattices electrodeposited on titanium substrate Hilal Kuru 1  · Nuray Çolak Aytekin 1  · Hakan Köçkar 1  · Mürşide Haciismailoğlu 2  · Mürsel Alper 2 Received: 27 June 2019 / Accepted: 3 September 2019 / Published online: 7 September 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract NiFe/Cu superlattices having diferent ferromagnetic NiFe layer thicknesses were grown on polycrystalline titanium sub- strate from a solution containing nickel, iron and copper ions under potentiostatic control. The NiFe layer thickness of the superlattices was changed from 1.5 to 8 nm while the Cu layer thickness was kept constant at 1 nm. The energy dispersive X-ray analysis revealed that, as the NiFe layer thickness increases, the Ni content of the samples increases, the Cu content decreases and Fe content decreases slightly. NiFe/Cu superlattices were polycrystalline face centred cubic (fcc) structure with NiFe and Cu layers adopting the fcc structure due to the low amount of Fe content in the deposits. The crystal orienta- tion of the superlattices was obtained as {111}. The lattice parameters were calculated and slightly decrease from 0.36012 to 0.35382 nm with increase in the NiFe layer thickness. According to the Scanning Electron Microscopy images, when the NiFe layer thickness increases, the caulifower region becomes less and then the granular-like regions were seen on the surface of the samples. And, the magnetic measurements showed that the saturation magnetization gradually increased from 12.9 to 291.3 emu/cm 3 with increasing NiFe layer thickness from 1.5 to 8 nm, confrming the increase of the Ni contents and decrease of the Cu amount in the superlattices. Also, the coercivities ranging from 25.1 to 63.2 Oe are between the soft and hard magnetic properties. The superlattices having NiFe layer thickness less than 5 nm showed giant magnetoresistance (GMR) while the superlattices having greater NiFe layer thicknesses showed aniotropic magnetoresistance. The GMR values of up to 2% were observed for NiFe/Cu superlattices deposited on titanium substrate. It is seen that this material may have the potential applications in sensor and recording media. 1 Introduction Nano-scale magnetic multilayers [1–3] and nanoparticles [4–6] which consists of Ni, Fe and Co metals have become the subject of numerous studies in recent years because of their unique electrical and magnetic properties. These studies are mainly focused on their giant magnetoresist- ance (GMR) efect which is very interesting magnetic and transport property that can be observed in the nanoscale metallic multilayered structures which contains alternately ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic layers. The GMR efect is attainable for multilayers and superlattices when the bilayer period thickness is less than 100 nm [1]. These magnetic superlattices have been intensively investigated owing to their promising applications in diferent tech- nological devices such as miniaturized magnetic sensors and high-density digital magnetic recording devices [7, 8]. Fabrication of these superlattices can be achieved by sev- eral methods such as sputtering, molecular beam epitaxy which require ultra-high vacuum and electrodeposition [2, 3, 9]. Electrodeposition has been widely used to fabricate the magnetic materials due to its advantages such as easy to control the deposit composition, fast growth rate, low cost and growth of magnetic and non magnetic layers with- out a vacuum system [10]. After the frst observation of * Hilal Kuru htopcu@balikesir.edu.tr Nuray Çolak Aytekin colaknuray89@gmail.com Hakan Köçkar hkockar@balikesir.edu.tr Mürşide Haciismailoğlu msafak@uludag.edu.tr Mürsel Alper malper@uludag.edu.tr 1 Department of Physics, Faculty of Science and Literature, University of Balikesir, Cagis, 10145 Balıkesir, Turkey 2 Department of Physics, Faculty of Science and Literature, University of Uludag, Gorukle, 16059 Bursa, Turkey