Photoemission and magnetic circular dichroism studies of magnetic semiconductors

Recently, a series of novel ferromagnetic semiconductors have been synthesized using MBE and related techniques and have attracted much attention because of unknown mechanisms of carrier-induced ferromagnetism and potential applications as "spin electronics" devices. Some new materials show ferromagnetism even well above room temperature. Photoemission spectroscopy has been used to study the $d$ orbitals of the dilute transition-metal atoms, mostly Mn, and their hybridization with the host band states [1]. Soft x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) at the transition-metal 2$p$-3$d$ absorption edges are useful techniques to study the valence and spin states of the transition-metal atoms. Furthermore, since MCD has different sensitivities to the ferromagnetic and paramagnetic components at different temperatures and magnetic fileds, if the sample is a mixture of ferromagnetic and non-ferromagnetic transition- metal atoms, it can be used to separate the two components and to study their electronic structures. In this talk, results are presented for the prototypical diluted ferromagnetic semiconductor Ga$_{1-x}$Mn$_x$As [2] and the room-temperature ferromagnets Zn$_{1-x}$Co$_x$O and Ti$_{1-x}$Co$_x$O$_2$.\\ I acknowledge collaboration with Y. Ishida, J.-I. Hwang, M. Kobayashi, Y. Takeda, Y. Saitoh, J. Okamoto, T. Okane, Y. Muramatsu, K. Mamiya, T. Koide, A. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, Hayashi, S. Ohya, T. Kondo, H. Munekata, H. Saeki, H. Tabata, T. Kawai, Y. Matsumoto, H. Koinuma, T. Fukumura and M. Kawasaki. This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research in Priority Area "Semiconductor nano-spintronics" (14076209) from MEXT, Japan.\\ 1. J. Okabayashi et al., Phys. Rev. B 64, 125304 (2001).\\ 2. A. Fujimori et al., J. Electron Spectrosc. Relat. Phenom., in press.\\