The effect of boric acid content on the properties of electrochemically prepared Ni-Fe/ITO thin films

Abstract

This paper reports the role of the boric acid (H3BO3) content in a sulphate based aqueous electrolyte (AE) on the magnetic characteristics, deposit composition, domain structure, surface morphologies and structural properties of the Ni-Fe/ITO thin film samples grown by electrochemical deposition (ED) technique. The results show that the amount of the H3BO3 must be controlled to obtain the proper Ni-Fe/ITO thin film samples without brittle properties. The influence of the H3BO3 content in the AE on the deposit composition, structural parameters and magnetic characteristics is found to be negligible. However, the roughness parameters and the size of the nodular particles are noticeably influenced by the H3BO3 content. All samples have nanosized crystallites in the range of 19.6-20.5 nm. The films possess almost the same magnetic squareness ratio (%11 +/- 2) and coercivity values (49 +/- 1 Oe). In all deposits, regardless of the H3BO3 content, quite large magnetic stripe domains with a width of 1.6 +/- 0.2 mu m are also detected. The films exhibit a uniform surface structure consisting of nodular particles. However, increasing H3BO3 content in the AE leads to a dramatic reduction in the width of the surface particles. Furthermore, the surface roughness of the samples considerably decreases as the H3BO3 content in the AE is increased.