We carefully investigated the ferromagnetic coupling in the as-grown and annealed ferromagnetic semiconductor GaMnAs/AlGaMnAs bilayer devices. We observed that the magnetic interaction between the two layers strongly affects the magnetoresistance of
the GaMnAs layer with applying out of plane magnetic field. After low temperature annealing, the magnetic easy axis of the AlGaMnAs layer switches from out of plane into in-plane and the interlayer coupling efficiency is reduced from up to 0.6 to less than 0.4. However, the magnetic coupling penetration depth for the annealed device is twice that of the as-grown bilayer device.
Electrical current manipulation of magnetization switching through spin-orbital coupling in ferromagnetic semiconductor (Ga,Mn)As Hall bar devices has been investigated. The efficiency of the current-controlled magnetization switching is found to be
sensitive to the orientation of the current with respect to the crystalline axes. The dependence of the spin-orbit effective magnetic field on the direction and magnitude of the current is determined from the shifts in the magnetization switching angle. We find that the strain induced effective magnetic field is about three times as large as the Rashba induced magnetic field in our GaMnAs devices.
