  The ab initio full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave method
explicitly designed for the slab geometry was employed to elucidate the
physical origin of the layer potentials for the trilayers nFe/3Cr/nFe(001),
where n is the number of Fe monolayers. The thickness of the transition-metal
ferromagnet has been ranged from $n=1$ up to n=8 while the spacer thickness was
fixed to 3 monolayers. The calculated potentials were inserted in the
Fuchs-Sondheimer formalism in order to calculate the giant magnetoresistance
(GMR) ratio. The predicted GMR ratio was compared with the experiment and the
oscillatory behavior of the GMR as a function of the ferromagnetic layer
thickness was discussed in the context of the layer potentials. The reported
results confirm that the interface monolayers play a dominant role in the
intrinsic GMR.
