Monte Carlo Study of Ferromagnetism in (III,Mn)V Semiconductors

Abstract

We report on Monte Carlo studies of the kinetic exchange model for (III,Mn)V ferromagnetic semiconductors in which S=5/2 local moments, representing Mn^{2+} ions, are exchange coupled to band electrons. We treat the Mn^{2+}$ spin orientations as classical degrees of freedom and use the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm to explore thermodynamically important Mn spin configurations. The critical temperature T_c of the model is unambiguously signalled in our finite-size simulations by pronounced peaks in fluctuations of both Mn and band carrier total spins. The T_c's we obtain are, over much of the model's parameter space, substantially smaller than those estimated using mean-field theory. When mean-field theory fails, short-range magnetic order and finite {\em local} carrier spin polarisation are present for temperatures substantially larger than T_{c}. For the simplest version of the model, which has a single parabolic band with effective mass m^*, the dependence of T_{c} on m^* is sublinear at large masses, in disagreement with the mean-field theory result T_{c} \propto m^*. For the carrier densities studied, results obtained with a six-band Luttinger model band Hamiltonian are in good agreement with those obtained for a model with a single parabolic band whose effective mass is equal to the Kohn-Luttinger model heavy-hole mass.