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Epitaxial growth, magnetoresistance, and electronic band structure of GdSb magnetic semimetal films

Hadass S. Inbar1,*, Dai Q. Ho2,3, Shouvik Chatterjee4,†, Mihir Pendharkar4,‡, Aaron N. Engel1, Jason T. Dong1, Shoaib Khalid2,§, Yu Hao Chang1, Taozhi Guo1,∥ et al.

Alexei V. Fedorov5, Donghui Lu6, Makoto Hashimoto6, Dan Read4,7, Anderson Janotti2, and Christopher J. Palmstrøm1,4,¶

  • 1Materials Department, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA
  • 2Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716, USA
  • 3Faculty of Natural Sciences, Quy Nhon University, Quy Nhon 59000, Vietnam
  • 4Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA
  • 5Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 6Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
  • 7School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF24 3AA, United Kingdom

  • *hadass@ucsb.edu
  • †Present address: Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai 400005, India.
  • ‡Present address: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
  • §Present address: Department of Physics, School of Natural Sciences, National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan.
  • ∥Present Address: Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 08540, USA.
  • cjpalm@ucsb.edu
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Phys. Rev. Materials 6, L121201 – Published 9 December, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.6.L121201

Abstract

Motivated by observations of extreme magnetoresistance (XMR) in bulk crystals of rare-earth monopnictide (RE-V) compounds and emerging applications in novel spintronic and plasmonic devices based on thin-film semimetals, we have investigated the electronic band structure and transport behavior of epitaxial GdSb thin films grown on III-V semiconductor surfaces. The Gd3+ ion in GdSb has a high spin S=7/2 and no orbital angular momentum, serving as a model system for studying the effects of antiferromagnetic order and strong exchange coupling on the resulting Fermi surface and magnetotransport properties of RE-Vs. We present a surface and structural characterization study mapping the optimal synthesis window of thin epitaxial GdSb films grown on III-V lattice-matched buffer layers via molecular-beam epitaxy. To determine the factors limiting XMR in RE-V thin films and provide a benchmark for band-structure predictions of topological phases of RE-Vs, the electronic band structure of GdSb thin films is studied, comparing carrier densities extracted from magnetotransport, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), and density-functional theory (DFT) calculations. ARPES shows a hole-carrier rich, topologically trivial, semimetallic band structure close to complete electron-hole compensation, with quantum confinement effects in the thin films observed through the presence of quantum-well states. DFT-predicted Fermi wave vectors are in excellent agreement with values obtained from quantum oscillations observed in magnetic field-dependent resistivity measurements. An electron-rich Hall coefficient is measured despite the higher hole-carrier density, attributed to the higher electron Hall mobility. The carrier mobilities are limited by surface and interface scattering, resulting in lower magnetoresistance than that measured for bulk crystals.

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Phys. Rev. Materials 6, L121201– Published 9 December, 2022
  • Received 5 August 2022
  • Accepted 20 October 2022
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