No Arabic abstract
A major challenge for the next generation of spintronics devices is the implementation of ferromagnetic-semiconductor thin films as spin injectors and detectors. Spin-polarised carrier injection cannot be accomplished efficiently from metals, and coupled with the rarity of intrinsic ferromagnetic semiconductors this has driven intensive study of diluted magnetic semiconductors. Chief among these is the doped III-V compound (Ga,Mn)As. These materials suffer from a number of drawbacks; they (i) require magnetic-ion doping well above the solubility limit, and (ii) must be hole doped to above the degenerate limit, preventing independent control of the carrier concentration and charge sign. Here we demonstrate the first epitaxial growth of a recently-characterised intrinsic ferromagnetic semiconductor, GdN, on silicon substrates, providing an essential step on the way to integrate new spintronics functionalities into Si-based technology. The films have been characterised as regards their growth toward fully relaxed GdN, the density and mobility of their carriers, and their magnetic behaviour.
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The development of graphene electronics requires the integration of graphene devices with Si-CMOS technology. Most strategies involve the transfer of graphene sheets onto silicon, with the inherent difficulties of clean transfer and subsequent graphene nano-patterning that degrades considerably the electronic mobility of nanopatterned graphene. Epitaxial graphene (EG) by contrast is grown on an essentially perfect crystalline (semi-insulating) surface, and graphene nanostructures with exceptional properties have been realized by a selective growth process on tailored SiC surface that requires no graphene patterning. However, the temperatures required in this structured growth process are too high for silicon technology. Here we demonstrate a new graphene to Si integration strategy, with a bonded and interconnected compact double-wafer structure. Using silicon-on-insulator technology (SOI) a thin monocrystalline silicon layer ready for CMOS processing is applied on top of epitaxial graphene on SiC. The parallel Si and graphene platforms are interconnected by metal vias. This method inspired by the industrial development of 3d hyper-integration stacking thin-film electronic devices preserves the advantages of epitaxial graphene and enables the full spectrum of CMOS processing.
Hybrid semiconductor-ferromagnetic insulator heterostructures are interesting due to their tunable electronic transport, self-sustained stray field and local proximitized magnetic exchange. In this work, we present lattice matched hybrid epitaxy of semiconductor - ferromagnetic insulator InAs/EuS heterostructures and analyze the atomic-scale structure as well as their electronic and magnetic characteristics. The Fermi level at the InAs/EuS interface is found to be close to the InAs conduction band and in the bandgap of EuS, thus preserving the semiconducting properties. Both neutron and X-ray reflectivity measurements show that the ferromagnetic component is mainly localized in the EuS thin film with a suppression of the Eu moment in the EuS layer nearest the InAs. Induced moments in the adjacent InAs layers were not detected although our ab initio calculations indicate a small exchange field in the InAs layer. This work presents a step towards realizing high quality semiconductor - ferromagnetic insulator hybrids, which is a critical requirement for development of various quantum and spintronic applications without external magnetic fields.
We report the epitaxial growth of CdCr2Se4, an n-type ferromagnetic semiconductor, on both GaAs and GaP(001) substrates, and describe the structural, magnetic and electronic properties. Magnetometry data confirm ferromagnetic order with a Curie temperature of 130 K, as in the bulk material. The magnetization exhibits hysteretic behavior with significant remanence, and an in-plane easy axis with a coercive field of ~125 Oe. Temperature dependent transport data show that the films are semiconducting in character and n-type as grown, with room temperature carrier concentrations of n ~ 1 x 10^18 cm-3.
We report measurements of the optical gap in a GdN film at temperatures from 300 to 6K, covering both the paramagnetic and ferromagnetic phases. The gap is 1.31eV in the paramagnetic phase and red-shifts to 0.9eV in the spin-split bands below the Curie temperature. The paramagnetic gap is larger than was suggested by very early experiments, and has permitted us to refine a (LSDA+U)-computed band structure. The band structure was computed in the full translation symmetry of the ferromagnetic ground state, assigning the paramagnetic-state gap as the average of the majority- and minority-spin gaps in the ferromagnetic state. That procedure has been further tested by a band structure in a 32-atom supercell with randomly-oriented spins. After fitting only the paramagnetic gap the refined band structure then reproduces our measured gaps in both phases by direct transitions at the X point.