Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of antiferromagnets as the active component in spintronic devices. This is in contrast to their current passive role as pinning layers in hard disk read heads and magnetic memories. Here we report the epitaxial growth of a new high-temperature antiferromagnetic material, tetragonal CuMnAs, which exhibits excellent crystal quality, chemical order and compatibility with existing semiconductor technologies. We demonstrate its growth on the III-V semiconductors GaAs and GaP, and show that the structure is also lattice matched to Si. Neutron diffraction shows collinear antiferromagnetic order with a high Ne\'el temperature. Combined with our demonstration of room-temperature exchange coupling in a CuMnAs/Fe bilayer, we conclude that tetragonal CuMnAs films are suitable candidate materials for antiferromagnetic spintronics.
@article{arxiv.1402.3624,
title = {Tetragonal phase of epitaxial room-temperature antiferromagnet CuMnAs},
author = {P. Wadley and V. Novák and R. P. Campion and C. Rinaldi and X. Martí and H. Reichlová and J. Zelezný and J. Gazquez and M. A. Roldan and M. Varela and D. Khalyavin and S. Langridge and D. Kriegner and F. Máca and J. Masek and R. Bertacco and V. Holy and A. W. Rushforth and K. W. Edmonds and B. L. Gallagher and C. T. Foxon and J. Wunderlich and T. Jungwirth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.3624},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
16 pages, 5 figures, Published in Nature Communications (2013)