Correlated defects, metal-insulator transition, and magnetic order in ferromagnetic semiconductors

Abstract

The effect of disorder on transport and magnetization in ferromagnetic III-V semiconductors, in particular (Ga,Mn)As, is studied theoretically. We show that Coulomb-induced correlations of the defect positions are crucial for the transport and magnetic properties of these highly compensated materials. We employ Monte Carlo simulations to obtain the correlated defect distributions. Exact diagonalization gives reasonable results for the spectrum of valence-band holes and the metal-insulator transition only for correlated disorder. Finally, we show that the mean-field magnetization also depends crucially on defect correlations.