Strong crystal anisotropy of magneto-transport property in Fe₃Si epitaxial film

This work reports the magneto-anisotropy property of epitaxial Fe ₃Si film grown on GaAs (0 0 1) substrate by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). We present a strong dependence of anisotropic magnetoresistance (MR) on field in the Fe₃Si film plane. The electron transport behavior is highly dependent on the direction of the current either parallel or perpendicular to the magnetic easy axis. By altering the direction of current from magnetic hard axis to magnetic easy axis, the unconventional behavior switches to normal anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR). In addition, the anisotropic behaviors were also observed from the magneto-optic Kerr effect (MOKE) measurement, which demonstrates unusual anisotropic properties with the crystalline anisotropic constant K₁=(3.8±0.2)×10 ⁴ erg/cm³ and uni-axial anisotropy K_u=(1. 2±0.04)×10⁴ erg/cm³. The ratio K ₁/K_u was used to account for the MR.