Pulsed laser deposition and optical characterizations of the magnetic samarium orthoferrite

Pulsed Laser Deposition of magnetically ordered polycrystalline SmFeO3 films has been optimized onto SiO2 glass substrates as function of substrate temperature, oxygen pressure and pulsed laser fluency. Using a KrF excimer laser, crystallization temperature is found to be about 1048 K for a weak fluency of only 1.7 J cm− 2. We show that this growth temperature can be reduced using higher fluency and that it is possible to obtain a film texturation along the c axis by reducing the oxygen pressure at given temperature and fluency. In a second part, we focus on the SmFeO3 optical constants determined by in situ ellipsometry using a stacking model and the Cauchy dispersion relation for SmFeO3 layer. We show a good correlation between the transmission and reflection calculated from these data and measured by ex situ spectrophotometry in the visible range.