Combinatorial fabrication and spectroscopic analysis of Fe-Co-Cr ternary alloy thin film

The development of a high-throughput experiment is an important issue in materials informatics, especially for materials discovery. Recently, combinatorial deposition and high-throughput analysis are rapidly progressed [1]. However, the combination of material fabrication and property analysis still leaves much room for development. Particularly, a question is raised about whether comprehensive phase diagram mapping is the optimum solution for materials discovery.
Here, we focus on exploring the phase transition for the materials discovery and combined the combinatorial wedged thin film deposition, the synchrotron-based micro-spectroscopic characterization, and the statistical analysis of experimental bigdata. X-ray absorption spectrum and magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) information were recorded by photoelectron emission microscopy. We obtained chemical components and magnetic contrast in each pixel of the image and analysed the histogram of MCD contrast as a variation of the chemical composition of Fe-Co-Cr. We fitted MCD histogram by Landau theory to discuss the ferromagnetic phase transition.

[1]M.L.Green.et.all, Applications of high throughput methodologies to electronic, magnetic, optical, and energy related materials. J. Appl. Phys. 113, 231101 (2013).