Manganese-based magnetic compounds grown on III-V semiconductors: growth technique, magnetic properties, and applications

In this paper we firstly discuss briefly developments in the field of ferromagnetic/semiconductor hybrid devices. We will emphasize the potential of the use of epitaxial technique to tailor the magnetic properties and to improve potential device characteristics. We will describe further the advantage of Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) to produce excellent heterostructure interfaces between ferromagnetic and semiconductor layers. As a prime example of how magnetic properties can be controlled by MBE we describe our recent results on the epitaxy of ferromagnetic Mn₂Sb on GaAs. We show the substrate temperature dependence of the crystallographic and magnetic properties of (001) Mn₂Sb films grown on (001) GaAs substrates. The Mn ₂Sb epitaxial film grown at 150°C shows high quality and single crystallinity of the film with an automatically flat Mn₂ Sb/GaAs heterointerface. The small coercive field and the large magneto-optical Kerr effect are very promising for ferromagnetic/semiconductor hybrid devices. The correlation between the crystallographic and magnetic properties is discussed