An investigation was made of the magnetic and electrical properties of a heavy-ion irradiated single crystalline iron film. A high quality Fe (001) film on MgO (001) was fabricated using the molecular beam epitaxy technique. The iron film was treated by 3.2MeV Ni ion irradiation at room temperature using a tandem accelerator. Although the residual electrical resistivity increased by 0.9 x  10-8Ωm after ion irradiation, the M-H curves did not change significantly. These results indicate that the formation of small irradiation defects such as sub-nanometer size vacancy clusters has little influence on magnetocrystalline anisotropy and the magnetization process of iron.

Effects of Room Temperature Heavy-Ion Irradiation on Magnetic and Electrical Properties of a Single Crystalline Iron Thin Film. Y.Kamada, H.Watanabe, S.Mitani, J.Echigoya, H.Kikuchi, S.Kobayashi, N.Yoshida, K.Takanashi: Materials Transactions, 2009, 50[9], 2134-8