No Arabic abstract
The element-specific technique of x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) is used to directly determine the magnitude and character of the valence band orbital magnetic moments in (III,Mn)As ferromagnetic semiconductors. A distinct dichroism is observed at the As K absorption edge, yielding an As 4p orbital magnetic moment of around -0.1 Bohr magnetons per valence band hole. This is strongly influenced by strain, indicating its crucial influence on the magnetic anisotropy. The dichroism at the Ga K edge is much weaker. The K edge XMCD signals for Mn and As both have positive sign, which indicates the important contribution of Mn 4p states to the Mn K edge spectra.
The magnetic circular dichroism of III-V diluted magnetic semiconductors, calculated within a theoretical framework suitable for highly disordered materials, is shown to be dominated by optical transitions between the bulk bands and an impurity band formed from magnetic dopant states. The theoretical framework incorporates real-space Greens functions to properly incorporate spatial correlations in the disordered conduction band and valence band electronic structure, and includes extended and localized electronic states on an equal basis. Our findings reconcile unusual trends in the experimental magnetic circular dichroism in III-V DMSs with the antiferromagnetic p-d exchange interaction between a magnetic dopant spin and its host.
A systematic study of hole compensation effect on magnetic properties, which is controlled by defect compensation through ion irradiation, in (Ga,Mn)As, (In,Mn)As and (Ga,Mn)P is presented in this work. In all materials, both Curie temperature and magnetization decrease upon increasing the hole compensation, confirming the description of hole mediated ferromagnetism according to the p-d Zener model. The material dependence of Curie temperature and magnetization versus hole compensation reveals that the manipulation of magnetic properties in III-Mn-V dilute ferromagnetic semiconductors by ion irradiation is strongly influenced by the energy level location of the produced defect relative to the band edges in semiconductors.
The relationship between the modern and classical Landaus approach to carrier orbital magnetization is studied theoretically within the envelope function approximation, taking ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As as an example. It is shown that while the evaluation of hole magnetization within the modern theory does not require information on the band structure in a magnetic field, the number of basis wave functions must be much larger than in the Landau approach to achieve the same quantitative accuracy. A numerically efficient method is proposed, which takes advantages of these two theoretical schemes. The computed magnitude of orbital magnetization is in accord with experimental values obtained by x-ray magnetic circular dichroism in (III,Mn)V compounds. The direct effect of the magnetic field on the hole spectrum is studied too, and employed to interpret a dependence of the Coulomb blockade maxima on the magnetic field in a single electron transistor with a (Ga,Mn)As gate.
To clarify the whole picture of the valence-band structures of prototype ferromagnetic semiconductors (III,Mn)As (III: In and Ga), we perform systematic experiments of the resonant tunneling spectroscopy on [(In_0.53Ga_0.47)_1-x Mn_x]As (x=0.06-0.15) and In_0.87Mn_0.13As grown on AlAs/ In_0.53Ga_0.47As:Be/ p+InP(001). We show that the valence band of InGaMnAs almost remains unchanged from that of the host semiconductor InGaAs, that the Fermi level exists in the band gap, and that the p-d exchange splitting in the valence band is negligibly small in (InGaMn)As. In the In0.87Mn0.13As sample, although the resonant peaks are very weak due to the large strain induced by the lattice mismatch between InP and InMnAs, our results also indicate that the Fermi level exists in the band gap and that the p-d exchange splitting in the valence band is negligibly small. These results are quite similar to those of GaMnAs obtained by the same method, meaning that there are no holes in the valence band, and that the impurity-band holes dominate the transport and magnetism both in the InGaMnAs and In_0.87Mn_0.13As films. This band picture of (III,Mn)As is remarkably different from that of II-VI-based diluted magnetic semiconductors.
We demonstrate how first-principles calculations using density-functional theory (DFT) can be applied to gain insight into the molecular processes that rule the physics of materials processing. Specifically, we study the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) of arsenic compound semiconductors. For homoepitaxy of GaAs on GaAs(001), a growth model is presented that builds on results of DFT calculations for molecular processes on the beta2-reconstructed GaAs(001) surface, including adsorption, desorption, surface diffusion and nucleation. Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations on the basis of the calculated energetics enable us to model MBE growth of GaAs from beams of Ga and As_2 in atomistic detail. The simulations show that island nucleation is controlled by the reaction of As_2 molecules with Ga adatoms on the surface. The analysis reveals that the scaling laws of standard nucleation theory for the island density as a function of growth temperature are not applicable to GaAs epitaxy. We also discuss heteroepitaxy of InAs on GaAs(001), and report first-principles DFT calculations for In diffusion on the strained GaAs substrate. In particular we address the effect of heteroepitaxial strain on the growth kinetics of coherently strained InAs islands. The strain field around an island is found to cause a slowing-down of material transport from the substrate towards the island and thus helps to achieve more homogeneous island sizes.