Effect of interfacial scattering on the anomalous Hall effect in Fe/MgO multilayers

Interfacial scattering plays a critical role in the magneto-transport properties in thin films, especially ultrathin films. In this work, we prepared [Fe(20 Å)/MgO(t)]20 multilayers with different MgO thickness t to study the interfacial scattering effect on the anomalous Hall effect. As t increases, MgO initially forms dots/flakes, which gradually connect to form continuous layers. Both longitudinal resistivity and anomalous Hall resistivity increase with MgO thickness until the MgO layers become continuous. The intrinsic, skew-scattering, and side-jump contributions to the AHE were extracted from the data. The intrinsic mechanism dominated the AHE in Fe/MgO multilayers.