Film deposition by means of a beam of sputtered particles was studied. The sputtered particles are ejected from a sputtering chamber and deposited on a substrate in another evacuated chamber. The method makes uses of the gettering effect of high-rate sputtering, together with a cold-wall effect that suppresses desorption of impure gases from chamber walls. The crystal structure and magnetic properties of Fe films thus deposited were studied. The films exhibit higher crystal growth, higher electrical conductivity, and lower coercivity than films deposited by a conventional RF diode sputtering system. These results suggest that, by further improvement of the system, the method may be applied to the production of various multi-element single-crystal films of high quality.

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  The effects of magnetic field annealing on the magnetic anisotropy of Fe-Zr-N fine-grained films multilayered with AlN films as spacers were investigated. The thermal stability of the magnetic anisotropy was dependent on the multilayered structure. After pre-annealing at 673 K for 1 hour, reversible relaxations of ΔK_u = 100～700 J/m³ were found in the field induced anisotropy, depending on thickness of the magnetic layers. It was found that non-magnetic layer AlN effected on the field induced anisotropy of the magnetic layers and contributed its thermal stability of the soft magnetic properties.

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