Interfacial effects on the magnetic profiles and interlayer exchange coupling of Co/CoSi multilayers

Density functional calculations are conducted to investigate the interlayer exchange coupling (IEC) between ferromagnetic Co slabs mediated by a CoSi spacer in Co/CoSi(001) multilayers with CsCl crystalline structure. For both sharp and mixed Co–Si interfaces we calculated the magnetic moment distribution and the energy stability for ferromagnetic (F) IEC and antiferromagnetic (AF) IEC between the Co slabs as function of the spacer thickness. We show that mixing near to the interface noticeably modifies the IEC to the extent that this can change from an oscillatory IEC as function of the spacer thickness to an exponentially decaying AF behavior.