Hysteresis in the magneto-transport of Manganese-doped Germanium: evidence for carrier-mediated ferromagnetism

The III-V compound GaMnAs is considered as being the prototype diluted ferromagnetic semiconductor (FMS), exhibiting negative magnetoresistance (MR) and anomalous Hall effect (AHE) related to carrier-mediated ferromagnetism. However, it would be very desirable to have a group-IV FMS, being compatible with silicon technology. In particular manganese-doped germanium prepared using low-temperature molecular beam epitaxy (LT-MBE) has proven to be a very promising material [1]. Still, no direct correspondence between transport and magnetization data has been reported yet to date. The reported MR and AHE in Ge:Mn are likely caused by (super)paramagnetic Mn ions or precipitates or by two-band-like conduction [2]. We believe that the origin of these observations lies in the less effective substitution of Mn at Ge sites, which results in too low a hole concentration, making carrier-mediated ferromagnetism impossible. The hole concentrations realized in Ge:Mn grown by LT-MBE are mostly well below 10¹⁹ cm^-3, which indicates the possible unsuitability of LT-MBE to achieve a large hole concentration in Ge:Mn.

In this contribution, we show that the hole concentration can be increased by two orders of magnitude, from 10¹⁸ to 10²⁰ cm^-3, through Mn-ion implantation into Ge followed by pulsed laser annealing [3]. In Mn-doped Ge with a hole-concentration of around 2.1×10²⁰ cm^-3, we observe that the longitudinal (Fig. 1c) and the Hall (Fig. 1b) resistance exhibit the same hysteresis as the magnetization (Fig. 1a) at temperatures below 10 K. This hysteresis in magneto-transport is usually considered as a direct evidence of carrier-mediated ferromagnetism. In sharp contrast to this, such effects are absent in Mn-doped Ge with a smaller hole-concentration. Below 10 K, the resistance of Ge:Mn films is nearly constant, i.e., quasi metallic, while from 10 to 20 K it decreases steeply with an activation energy of 4 meV. The magnetic and magneto-transport properties can be qualitatively well explained within a picture of dopant segregation and the formation of bound magnetic polarons. We will present a comprehensive correlation between the magnetic, transport and structural properties of Ge:Mn samples with different hole concentrations, as well as a comparison with literature. Note that ion implantation followed by pulsed laser annealing is an established scalable chip technology and may have a significant industry impact.

[1] Y. D. Park et al., Science 295, 651 (2002); M. Jamet et al., Nature Mater. 5, 653 (2006).
[2] S. Zhou et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 172103 (2009); Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 192505 (2009).
[3] S. Zhou et al., Phys. Rev. B (2010), submitted.