Determination of the local concentrations of Mn interstitials and antisite defects in GaMnA.pdfVIP

Determination of the local concentrations of Mn interstitials and antisite defects in GaMnAs F. Glas, G. Patriarche, L. Largeau, and A. Lemaître Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures, CNRS, route de Nozay, 91460 Marcoussis, France Abstract: We present a method for the determination of the local concentrations of interstitial and substitutional Mn atoms and As antisite defects in GaMnAs. The method relies on the sensitivity of the structure factors of weak reflections to the concentrations and locations of these minority constituents. High spatial resolution is obtained by combining structure factor measurement and X-ray analysis in a transmission electron microscope. We demonstrate the prevalence of interstitials with As nearest neighbors in as-grown layers. PACS numbers: 68.55.Ln, 75.50.Pp, 68.37.Lp 1 The combination of electronic and magnetic properties in a single device opens large prospects to information technology. To this end, a particularly interesting material is GaMnAs, a GaAs crystal containing several percents of Mn atoms (for a recent review, see Ref. [1]). GaMnAs is a ferromagnetic semiconductor compatible with the well-mastered GaAs system, where Curie temperatures TC above 160 K have already been measured [2]. Boosted by predictions of possible room temperature ferromagnetism [3], a large effort involving the controlled fabrication of the material as well as the characterization and understanding of its physical properties has developed. Basically, GaMnAs is a zinc-blende GaAs crystal where a small fraction of Mn atoms has been introduced. However, experimental and theoretical investigations have shown that this material cannot be described simply as a GaAs crystal where all Mn atoms substitute to Ga atoms to form a proper GaMnAs