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Tailoring ferromagnetic chalcopyrites

Nature Materials volume 3, pages 410–414 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

If magnetic semiconductors are ever to find wide application in real spintronic devices, their magnetic and electronic properties will require tailoring in much the same way that bandgaps are engineered in conventional semiconductors. Unfortunately, no systematic understanding yet exists of how, or even whether, properties such as Curie temperatures and bandgaps are related in magnetic semiconductors. Here we explore theoretically these and other relationships within 64 members of a single materials class, the Mn-doped II-IV-V2 chalcopyrites (where II, IV and V represent elements from groups II, IV and V, respectively); three of these compounds are already known experimentally to be ferromagnetic semiconductors. Our first-principles results reveal a variation of magnetic properties across different materials that cannot be explained by either of the two dominant models of ferromagnetism in semiconductors. On the basis of our results for structural, electronic and magnetic properties, we identify a small number of new stable chalcopyrites with excellent prospects for ferromagnetism.

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Figure 1: Theoretical bandgap versus theoretical lattice constant for the II-IV-V2 chalcopyrites considered here.
Figure 2: Theoretical enthalpy of formation versus theoretical lattice constant for II-IV-V2 chalcopyrites.
Figure 3: Theoretical impurity formation energy of substitutional Mn versus theoretical lattice constant of host chalcopyrite.
Figure 4: Theoretical spin coupling between MnIV versus theoretical relative impurity formation energy of MnIV, ΔE.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. A. Medvedkin for discussions. Computations were performed at the DoD Major Shared Resource Center at ASC. I.Ž. acknowledges financial support from the National Research Council. This work was supported by ONR and the DARPA SpinS program.

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  1. Center for Computational Materials Science, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, 20375, DC, USA

    Steven C. Erwin & Igor Žutić

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  1. Steven C. Erwin
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  2. Igor Žutić
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Correspondence to Steven C. Erwin.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Erwin, S., Žutić, I. Tailoring ferromagnetic chalcopyrites. Nature Mater 3, 410–414 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1127

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