Owing to their giant magnetoresistance properties, multilayer thin film materials (MLFs) are widely used in information storage technology. However, because this magnetic behaviour is highly sensitive to the roughness and diffuseness on a sub-nanometer scale, the structural characterisation of these materials with high spatial resolution is of fundamental importance in understanding the properties. The three-dimensional atom probe (3DAP) is one of the instruments that can theoretically offer the best analysing performance on such materials [1, 2]. However, 3DAP reconstructions of MLF samples are found to be affected by strong artefacts due to differences in evaporation field between chemical species (fig 1a). It is therefore essential to associate experimental analyses to theoretical investigations of the evaporation and reconstruction process to obtain the best reconstructions from these materials.
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