Exchange Coupling in Magnetic Semiconductor Multilayers and Superlattices

Abstract

The study of ferromagnetic semiconductors continues to be of great interest because of their potential for spintronic devices. While there has been much progress in our understanding of ferromagnetic semiconductor materials - particularly of the canonical III-V system Ga1-xMnxAs - many issues still remain unresolved. One of these is the nature of interlayer exchange coupling in GaMnAs-based multilayers, an issue that is important from the point of view of possible spintronic applications. In this connection, it is important to establish under what conditions the interlayer exchange coupling between successive GaMnAs layers is antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic, since manipulation of such interlayer exchange coupling can then be directly applied to achieve giant magnetoresistance and other devices based on this material. In this review we will describe magneto-transport, magnetization, and neutron reflectometry experiments applied to two types of GaMnAs-based multilayer structures - superlattices and tri-layers - consisting of GaMnAs layers separated by non-magnetic GaAs spacers. These measurements serve to identify conditions under which AFM coupling will occur in such GaMnAs/GaAs multilayer systems, thus providing us the information which can be used for manipulating magnetization (and thus also giant magnetoresistance) in structures based on the ferromagnetic semiconductor GaMnAs.