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Published on: March 24, 2019
Room-temperature local ferromagnetism and its nanoscale expansion in the ferromagnetic semiconductor Ge(1-x)Fex
Yuki K Wakabayashi1, Shoya Sakamoto2, Yuki-haru Takeda3
1Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
Abstract:
We investigate the local electronic structure and magnetic properties of the group-IV-based ferromagnetic semiconductor, Ge(1-x)Fex (GeFe), using soft X-ray magnetic circular dichroism. Our results show that the doped Fe 3d electrons are strongly hybridized with the Ge 4p states, and have a large orbital magnetic moment relative to the spin magnetic moment; i.e., morb/mspin ≈ 0.1. We find that nanoscale local ferromagnetic regions, which are formed through ferromagnetic exchange interactions in the high-Fe-content regions of the GeFe films, exist even at room temperature, well above the Curie temperature of 20-100 K. We observe the intriguing nanoscale expansion of the local ferromagnetic regions with decreasing temperature, followed by a transition of the entire film into a ferromagnetic state at the Curie temperature.
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