Orbital magnetization in dilute ferromagnetic semiconductors

Abstract

The relationship between the modern and classical Landau's approach to carrier orbital magnetization is studied theoretically within the envelope function approximation, taking ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As as an example. It is shown that while the evaluation of hole magnetization within the modern theory does not require information on the band structure in a magnetic field, the number of basis wave functions must be much larger than in the Landau approach to achieve the same quantitative accuracy. A numerically efficient method is proposed, which takes advantages of these two theoretical schemes. The computed magnitude of orbital magnetization is in accord with experimental values obtained by x-ray magnetic circular dichroism in (III,Mn)V compounds. The direct effect of the magnetic field on the hole spectrum is studied too, and employed to interpret a dependence of the Coulomb blockade maxima on the magnetic field in a single electron transistor with a (Ga,Mn)As gate.